Parsing HTML on the command line; How to capture text in <strong></strong>?

Question

I'm trying to grab data from HTML output that looks like this:

<strong>Target1NoSpaces</strong><span class="creator"> ....
<strong>Target2 With Spaces</strong><span class="creator"> ....

I'm using a pipe train to whittle down the data to the targets I'm trying to hit. Here's my approach so far:

grep "/strong" output.html | awk '{print $1}'

Grep on "/strong" to get the lines with the targets; that works fine.

Pipe to 'awk '{print $1}'. That works in case #1 when the target has no spaces, but fails in case #2 when the target has spaces..only the first word is preserved as below:

<strong>Target1NoSpaces</strong><span
<strong>Target2

Do you have any tips on hitting the target properly, either in my awk or in different command? Anything quick and dirty (grep, awk, sed, perl) would be appreciated.

Update: I appreciate the suggestions to use a proper HTML parser or tool for scraping. However, at the time I was working on this, the process running the script didn't need to do more than pull lines out of a webpage retrieved using curl.

Answer 1

Using Perl regex's look-behind and look-ahead feature in grep. It should be simpler than using awk.

grep -oP "(?<=<strong>).*?(?=</strong>)" file

Output:

Target1NoSpaces
Target2 With Spaces

Add:

This implementation of Perl's regex's multi-matching in Ruby could match values in multiple lines:

ruby -e 'File.read(ARGV.shift).scan(/(?<=<strong>).*?(?=<\/strong>)/m).each{|e| puts "----------"; puts e;}' file

Input:

<strong>Target
A
B
C
</strong><strong>Target D</strong><strong>Target E</strong>

Output:

----------
Target
A
B
C
----------
Target D
----------
Target E