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jsonfirefoxgrepbookmarks

parsing FireFox bookmarks using regular expression

I tried to parse firefox bookmark(JSON exported version), using this efforts:

cat boo.json | grep '\"uri\"\:\"^http\://[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}\"'
cat boo.json | grep '"uri"\:"^http\://[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}'
cat boo.json | grep '"uri"\:"^http\://[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}"'

And few others but all fails, json bookmarked file will look like this:

.........."uri":"http://www.google.com/?"......"uri":"http://stackoverflow.com/"

So, the output should be like this:

"uri":"http://www.google.com/?"
"uri":"http://stackoverflow.com/"

What is the missing part on my regular expression?

UPDATE:

Url's on bookmark file ending with one of this special character:

/, ex: "uri":"http://stackoverflow.com/"

", ex: "uri":"http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13148794/parsing-firefox-bookmarks-using-regular-expression"

}, ex: "uri":"https://fr.add-ons.mozilla.com/fr/firefox/bookmarks/"}

With this modified regular expression:

$ egrep -o "(http|https)://([^ ]*).(*\/)"  boo.json

Result:

http://fr.fxfeeds.mozilla.com/fr/firefox/headlines.xml"},{"name":"livemark/siteURI","flags":0,"expires":4,"mimeType":null,"type":3,"value":"http://www.lemonde.fr/"}],"type":"text/x-moz-place-container","children":[]}]},{"index":2,"title":"Tags","id":4,"parent":1,"dateAdded":1344432674984000,"lastModified":1344432674984000,"type":"text/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13148794/parsing-firefox-bookmarks-using-regular-expression","charset":"UTF-8"},{"index":29,"title":"adrusi/
http://stackoverflow.com/
...

But with this still doesn't get me only url's.

Solution

  • Mr Jeff Atwood had posted an article the problem with urls, With his proposed Regular Expression, I managed to extract all the url's from FireFox bookmark:

    egrep -o "\(?\bhttp://[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%?=~_()|!:,.;]*[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%=~_()|]"  my-bookmark.json