regexp in the shell

[Dpk]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 01:10:34PM -0400, Dpk wrote:

   On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 12:53:50PM -0400, Morris, Alex wrote:
   
      I'm using the ksh shell and have a problem.  I have a variable
      in one of my scripts, and I need to extract a few characters
      from the variable and store it in another variable (preferably
      without using a temp file).
      
      The basic format of the variable is:
      
      IMPLEMNTATION  ----------------------- xxxxxxxx!yyyyy 1
      record(s) selected.
      
      I'm trying to extract that "xxxxxxxx" part.  The number of
      dashes, "-", is not static.  The number of "x"'s is not static.
      And the number of "y"'s is not static.  I figure that I can
      search through the variable and pull out everything between
      "----- " and "!", but I don't know how to search through the
      variable...
      
      Any idea how to do this, or what function to investigate?  I was
      looking at grep because it does regexp (which would make this
      easy) but it returns lines that match a pattern, it cannot
      extract text from a line.
      
      Any ideas?
   
   echo $myvariable |awk '{print $3}' |cut -d\! -f1

Further info, to assign it to a new variable name, just in case there
is confusion:

newvar=`echo $myvariable |awk '{print $3}' |cut -d\! -f1`