sed/awk: extract one number from string

Question

I have many lines like the following being returned from a bash command, with different sourceNodeIds of varying digit lengths:

<NodeAssociation sourceNodeId="33654" [...] sourceNodeEntity="Issue" /> 

I'd like to pipe it to sed or awk and just return the number nnnn from sourceNodeId="nnnn"

something like:

cat blah | sed 's/.+?sourceNodeId="\(\d+\)".+/\1/' 

but this isn't working. I'm on a Mac if that makes any difference (I think the version of sed may be different). I know Perl regexes, but I think sed is expecting a different kind.

Thanks!!!

Answer 1

sed doesn't know about \d and non-greedy matches. You don't need to use cat. This should work:

sed 's/.*sourceNodeId="\([0-9]\+\)".*/\1/' file 

Some sed versions are picky about wanting a -e (it will work even if it's not required):

sed -e 's/.*sourceNodeId="\([0-9]\+\)".*/\1/' file 

If your sed supports -r you can skip the escaping:

sed -er 's/.*sourceNodeId="([0-9]+)".*/\1/' file 

Answer 2

Also, works:

cat blah | cut -f2 -d\"