get the values of a specific line from a specific column

Question

what I want is to extract the list of a table with the following format

+---------+---------------+-------------+
| Region  | Parent Region | Description |
+---------+---------------+-------------+
| region1 | None          |             |
| region2 | None          |             |
+---------+---------------+-------------+

From region I want to get region1, region2.

what I have tried so far is

$ cat file |cut -d'+' -f1|cut -d'|' -f2

 Region  

 region1 

Any idea?

sed command which returns

Answer 1

I am not sure if sed is the right tool for this instead a native DB tool, but here you go:

sed -nE '3,$ s/^\|[[:blank:]]*([^[:blank:]|]*).*/\1/p' file.txt

• 3,$ does the operation only from line 3 till end

• ^\|[[:blank:]]*([^[:blank:]|]*).* matches | at the start and then whitespaces (if any) and the captured group contains the desired portion

• In the replacement we have used the first (only) captured group, \1

Example:

$ cat file.txt
+---------+---------------+-------------+
| Region  | Parent Region | Description |
+---------+---------------+-------------+
| region1 | None          |             |
| region2 | None          |             |
+---------+---------------+-------------+

$ sed -nE '3,$ s/^\|[[:blank:]]*([^[:blank:]|]*).*/\1/p' file.txt
region1
region2