Extract Value between XML tags with SED

Question

I am receiving data from a server in the following format:

gin1601DepthOfBook<         


        

Answer 1

Something like this would work:

 sed -e 's/<\/sessionId>/<\/sessionId>\n/g' | sed -n 's/.*<sessionId>\([^<]*\)<\/sessionId>.*/\1/p'

First part is because sed tries to eat up as much of a single line as possible when matching, this will find all sessionId occurences and split them up on a line on its own.

Next part matches stuff between the sessionId tags.

Answer 2

This might work for you (GNU sed):

sed '/<sessionId>/!d;s//\n/;s/[^\n]*\n//;:a;$!{/<\/sessionId>/!N;//!ba};y/\n/ /;s/<\/sessionId>/\n/;P;D' file

Answer 3

I would suggest using XPath, which is an XML query language. If you have the Perl XML::XPath module installed then you could simply use the following command in your shell:

xpath -q -e '//sessionId/text()' <input_file>