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

you can do it with the shell

while read -r line
do
    case "$line" in
        *abc*[0-9]*xyz* ) 
            t="${line##abc}"
            echo "num is ${t%%xyz}";;
    esac
done <"file"