Extract everything between quotes

Question

I am trying to use grep or sed to extract a url from a string which looks like javascript:open_window("http://www.example.com/somescript.ext?withquerystring=true");

The javascript link is generated -- by an external application I have no control over -- each time, so I have to extract the URL to use it. I have tried and failed to use a whole host of combinations of grep and sed, which haven't worked.

Solution 1

Using sed:

sed -E 's/.*\("(.*)"\).*/\1/'

Example:

echo 'javascript:open_window("http://www.example.com/somescript.ext?withquerystring=true")' | sed -E 's/.*\("(.*)"\).*/\1/'
http://www.example.com/somescript.ext?withquerystring=true

Solution 2

Simply with GNU grep:

s='javascript:open_window("http://www.example.com/somescript.ext?withquerystring=true");'
grep -Eo 'http:[^"]+' <<<"$s"
http://www.example.com/somescript.ext?withquerystring=true

Solution 3

awk 'BEGIN {FS = "\42"} {print $2}' <<'eof'
javascript:open_window("http://www.example.com/somescript.ext?withquerystring=true");
eof

Comments

[Hauke Laging]

Doesn't make much sense to me to use grep -P if grep -E does the same.

[RomanPerekhrest]

@HaukeLaging, true, updated. (Unintentionally missed)

[Scott - Слава Україні]

(1) Why bother?  There are two sed answers ahead of yours, and they are both simpler than yours. (2) If you read the documentation, or any of the thousands of sed questions on this site, you’ll see that you hardly ever need to pipe sed into sed.  A three-sed pipeline is definitely unnecessary.

[B. Shea]

You are looking for parenthesis? Why? Just remove those: sed -E 's/.*"(.*)".*/\1/' Question is: "Extract everything between quotes" not "Extract everything between quotes with parenthesis". Make your answer more generalized - it will still work for OP.