[SOLVED] Extract all ocurrences between delimiters being that they can appear more than one per line

Issue

I have a document file.yaml that have something like placeholders to replace:

class: ##TOPIC##-area
  name: myClass
type: Class
secretKey: private-##SECRET_KEY##

so far I've used grep to get the values of placeholders

grep -P '(?<=##).*(?=##)' file.yaml

then, I had those values:

TOPIC
SECRET_KEY

now, we have to introduce new properties that can have more than one placeholder per line

class: ##TOPIC##-area
  name: myClass
type: Class
secretKey: private-##SECRET_KEY##-encoded-##SUFFIX_CODE##

hence, grep no longer worked because the output became:

TOPIC
SECRET_KEY##-encoded-##SUFFIX_CODE

but, I want to have

TOPIC
SECRET_KEY
SUFFIX_CODE

I accept all kinds of suggestions and ideas to solve that. thanks

edit: the idea is to just get those placeholders, not replace them. sorry for the misunderstanding.

Solution

1st solution: With using GNU awk, please try following awk code. Simple explanation would be, setting RS(record separator) as ## till next occurrence of # followed by 2 occurrences of ##. Then simply printing matched lines only by removing the not needed ## in outcome as per shown output samples.

awk -v RS='##[^#]*##' 'RT{print substr(RT,3,length(RT)-4)}' Input_file

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2nd solution: With any awk, please try following program. Simple explanation would be, using match function of awk to match regex /##[^#]*##/(explained in above first solution already); in a while loop to print all the matches found in each line.

awk '{while(match($0,/##[^#]*##/)){print substr($0,RSTART+2,RLENGTH-4);$0=substr($0,RSTART+RLENGTH)}}' Input_file

Answered By - RavinderSingh13