How can I grep a text piece from a 1 line text file with delimiters

I want to grep STX= ....... until its first delimiter ' and IRF= ..... until its first delimiter '.

Like:

:STX=ANAA:1+asdf+5060128703127:P' IRF=16165193117+160624+160624 ' 

1 Answer

Thanks to @terdon and @jhilmer for making the quoting decidedly less tricky

If you want the '

$ grep -oE "(STX|IRF).*'" file STX=ANAA:1+asdf+5060128703127:P' IRF=16165193117+160624+160624 ' 

If you don't want the '

$ grep -oE "(STX|IRF)[^']*" STX=ANAA:1+asdf+5060128703127:P IRF=16165193117+160624+160624 

Explanation

• -o just show the matched part
• -E use ERE so we can use | to search for multiple patterns
• " start quoting/stop quoting
• (THIS|THAT) match THIS or THAT
• .* match any number of any characters
• \' literal '
• [^']* any number of any characters except '