how to use sed, awk, or gawk to print only what is matched?

Question

I see lots of examples and man pages on how to do things like search-and-replace using sed, awk, or gawk.

But in my case, I have a regular expression that I want to run

Answer 1

My sed (Mac OS X) didn't work with +. I tried * instead and I added p tag for printing match:

sed -n 's/^.*abc\([0-9]*\)xyz.*$/\1/p' example.txt

For matching at least one numeric character without +, I would use:

sed -n 's/^.*abc\([0-9][0-9]*\)xyz.*$/\1/p' example.txt