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I am trying to write a shell script which should crawl into a web page and fetch a particular character/phrase from its html and display it. Particular character means, for example if the html of the webpage contains a phrase, say password:blah, then I want to print the very next character/word to password, i.e., in short I want the script to print blah. How can I do this?

If more explanation needed, kindly ask. Thanks in advance!

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  • using wget/curl and grep could work on your example but what if the html contains password:blah<br>!#foo and I want to get blah<br>!#foo ?
    – Sylvain Pineau
    Oct 15, 2014 at 15:46

2 Answers 2

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You don't need a shell script. Probably the following compound command is what you need:

curl -s webpage | grep -Po 'password:\K\w+'

For example, the case of this page works:

curl -s http://askubuntu.com/questions/537416/copy-a-word-from-the-html-file-of-a-web-page-using-shell-script | grep -Po 'password:\K\w+'
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  • Not sure that it works if the password is blah<br>!#foo.
    – Sylvain Pineau
    Oct 15, 2014 at 15:44
  • @SylvainPineau Unlike you, I'm sure that it not works in this case :)) . But the OP was referred to a word.
    – Radu Rădeanu
    Oct 15, 2014 at 16:34
  • @RaduRădeanu Could you please explain me the use of -Po and \K\w+?
    – Anandu M Das
    Oct 16, 2014 at 14:33
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    @AnanduMDas: \K only return the strings after \K (See perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#Extended-Patterns). w+ match one or more "word" character (alphanumeric plus "_", plus other connector punctuation chars plus Unicode marks)
    – Sylvain Pineau
    Oct 16, 2014 at 14:33
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Something like that should work:

wget -qO- http://website.com | grep -oP 'password:.*'

See man wget for all options. wget can download the whole website.

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