If a child of div matches to some string I want to remove the whole div. For example:
<div>
some text here
if this text is matched, remove whole div
some other text
</div>
I have to do this on many files so I'm looking for some Linux commands like sed.
Thank you for looking into this.
If I understood your question correctly then it can be achieved in one single sed command:
sed '/<div>/I{:A;N;h;/<\/div>/I!{H;bA};/<\/div>/I{g;/\bsome text here\b/Id}}' file.txt
Let's say this is your file.txt:
a. no-div text
<DIV>
some text here
1. if this text is matched, remove whole DIV
some other text -- WILL MATCH
</div>
<div>
awesome text here
2. if this text is matched, remove whole DIV
this will NOT be matched
</div>
b. no-div text
<Div>
another text here
3. if this text is matched, remove whole DIV
and this too will NOT be matched
</Div>
<div>
Some TEXT Here
4. if this text is matched, remove whole DIV
foo bar foo bar - WILL MATCH
</DIV>
c. no-div text
a. no-div text
<div>
awesome text here
2. if this text is matched, remove whole DIV
this will NOT be matched
</div>
b. no-div text
<Div>
another text here
3. if this text is matched, remove whole DIV
and this too will NOT be matched
</Div>
c. no-div text
As you can verify from above output that wherever the pattern some text here was matched between div tags those div blocks have been completely removed.
PS: I am doing case insensitive search here, if you don't need that behavior please let me know. I will just need to remove I switch from above sed commands.
There's probably a better way to do this, but what I've done in the past is:
1) strip out newlines (because matching across lines is difficult at best and going backwards even worse)
2) parse
3) put newlines back in
cat /tmp/data | tr "\n" "@" | sed -e 's/<div>[^<]*some text here[^<]*<\/div>//g' | tr "@" "\n"
This is assuming that "@" can't appear in the file.
You may use ed instead of sed. The ed command reads the entire file into memory and performs an in-place file edit (i.e. there will be no security backups).
htmlstr='
<see file.txt in answer by anubhava>
'
matchstr='[sS][oO][mM][eE]\ [tT][eE][xX][tT]\ [hH][eE][rR][eE]'
divstr='[dD][iI][vV]'
# for in-place file editing use "ed -s file" and replace ",p" with "w"
# cf. http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/howto/edit-ed
cat <<-EOF | sed -e 's/^ *//' -e 's/ *$//' -e '/^ *#/d' | ed -s <(echo "$htmlstr")
H
# ?re? The previous line containing the regular expression re. (see man ed)
# '[[:<:]]' and '[[:>:]]' match the null string at the beginning and end of a word respectively. (see man re_format)
#,g/[[:<:]]${matchstr}[[:>:]]/?<${divstr}>?,/<\/${divstr}>/d
,g/[[:<:]]${matchstr}[[:>:]]/?<${divstr}>?+0,/<\/${divstr}>/+0d
,p
q
EOF
