Extracting information from a string using regex in bash

Question

I have a string variable in bash which looks like so:

{\"SOGoTimeFormat\": \"%H:%M\", \"SOGoMailShowSubscribedFoldersOnly\": \"0\", \"SOGoMailSignaturePlacement\         


        

Answer 1

jq is an excellent tool for parsing and editing JSON, easy to drive from shell.

# extract "enabled" field from "Forward"
enabled=$(jq '.Forward.enabled` <input.json)

...or, to do the whole thing in one pass:

jq '
  if .Forward.enabled==1 then
    .Forward.forwardAddress=[(
      .Forward.forwardAddress[] |
      select(. | test("testuser2") | not)
    )]
  else . end
' <input.json >output.json

Answer 2

What you have is JSON and what you should be using is a JSON parser. Using regex is not a good substitute.

Here's some python that loads the string, and if enabled in Forward is 1, deletes any address with the substring "testuser2" from the forwardAddress list:

#!/bin/python
import sys
import json

thing = json.load(sys.stdin)
forward = thing["Forward"]

if forward["enabled"] == 1:
    forward["forwardAddress"] = \
        filter(lambda x: not "testuser2" in x, \
            forward["forwardAddress"])

json.dump(thing, sys.stdout)

You can run it with

echo "$yourvariable" | python thisfile.py

The json re-encoding process might shuffle the fields. This doesn't matter, as the strings still represent the same json objects.