Removing lines between tags in a text file - bash

Question

I have many text files containing annotations. The original text is marked with lines containing the words:
START OF TEXT OF PASSAGE 1
END OF TEXT OF PASSAGE 1
Obviously I can search each document for the phrase START OF TEXT and delete everything up to it. Then search for END OF TEXT and start selecting text for deletion until I get to the next START OF TEXT.
I have come up with this design so far:
#!/bin/bash
a="START OF PROJECT"
b="END OF PROJECT"
while read line; do
if line contains a; do
while read line; do
'if line does not contain b'
'append the line to output.txt'; fi
done
done
fi
done
Perhaps there is an easier way using sed, awk, grep and pipes?
'for every document' 'loop through it doing this' ('find the original text between START and END' | >> output.txt)
Unfortunately I am poor at bash and ignorant of sed/awk.
The reason for this is that I am assembling a huge text document that is a concatenation of thousands of marked up documents – each of which contains some annotated passages.

Answer 1

In Python:
import re
with open('in.txt') as f, open('out.txt', 'w') as output:
output.write('\n'.join(re.findall(r'START OF TEXT(.*?)END OF TEXT', f.read())))
This reads the input, searches for all matches that begin and end with the necessary markers, captures the text of interest in a group, joins all those groups on a linefeed, and writes that to the result file.

Answer 2

Pretty easy to do with awk. You would create a script (I'll call it yank.awk) containing this:
#!/usr/bin/awk
/START OF PROJECT/ { capture = 1; next }
/END OF PROJECT/ { capture = 0 }
capture == 1 { print }
and then run it like so:
yank.awk in.txt > output.txt
Could also do with sed and grep:
sed -ne '/START OF PROJECT/,/END OF PROJECT/p' in.txt | grep -vE '(START|END) OF PROJECT' > output.txt

Answer 3

(Another Python solution)
You can have itertools.groupby group lines together based on a boolean value - just use a global flag to keep track of whether you are in a block or not, and then use groupby to group the lines that are in or out of blocks. Then just discard the ones that are not blocks:
sample_lines = """
lskdjflsdkjf
sldkjfsdlkjf
START OF TEXT
Asdlkfjlsdkfj
Bsldkjf
Clsdkjf
END OF TEXT
sldkfjlsdkjf
sdlkjfdklsjf
sdlkfjdlskjf
START OF TEXT
Dsdlkfjlsdkfj
Esldkjf
Flsdkjf
END OF TEXT
sldkfjlsdkjf
sdlkjfdklsjf
sdlkfjdlskjf
""".splitlines()
from itertools import groupby
in_block = False
def is_in_block(line):
global in_block
if line.startswith("END OF TEXT"):
in_block = False
ret = in_block
if line.startswith("START OF TEXT"):
in_block = True
return ret
for lines_are_text,lines in groupby(sample_lines, key=is_in_block):
if lines_are_text:
print(list(lines))
gives:
['Asdlkfjlsdkfj', 'Bsldkjf', 'Clsdkjf']
['Dsdlkfjlsdkfj', 'Esldkjf', 'Flsdkjf']
See that first group has the lines that start with A, B, and C, and the second group is made up of those lines starting with D, E, and F.

Answer 4

It sounds like the specific solution you need is:
awk '/END OF TEXT OF PASSAGE/{f=0} f; /START OF TEXT OF PASSAGE/{f=1}' file
See https://stackoverflow.com/a/18409469/1745001 for other ways to select text from files.

Answer 5

Use Perl's Flip-Flop Operator to Print Text Between Markers
Given a corpus like:
START OF TEXT OF PASSAGE 1
foo
END OF TEXT OF PASSAGE 1
START OF TEXT OF PASSAGE 2
bar
END OF TEXT OF PASSAGE 2
you can use the Perl flip-flop operator to process within a range of lines. For example, from the shell prompt:
$ perl -ne 'if (/^START OF TEXT/ ... /^END OF TEXT/) {
next if /^(?:START|END)/;
print;
}' /tmp/corpus
foo
bar
Basically, this short Perl script loops through your input. When it finds your start and end tags, it throws away the tags themselves and prints everything else in between.
Usage Notes
The line breaks between passages in the corpus are for readability. It doesn't matter if your real corpus has no line breaks between passages, so long as the text markers always start at the beginning of the line as shown in your original post. If that assumption doesn't hold true, then you will need to adjust the regular expressions used to identify the start and end of your passages.
You can pass multiple files to the Perl script. Again, it makes no practical difference as long as you don't exceed the length limit of your shell.
If you want the final output to go to somewhere other than standard output, just use shell redirection. For example:
perl -ne 'if (/^START OF TEXT/ ... /^END OF TEXT/) {
next if /^(?:START|END)/;
print;
}' /tmp/file1 /tmp/file2 /tmp/file3 > /tmp/output

Answer 6

You can use sed as follows:
sed -n '/^START OF TEXT/,/^END OF TEXT/{/^\(START\|END\) OF TEXT/!p}' infile
or, with extended regular expressions (-r):
sed -rn '/^START OF TEXT/,/^END OF TEXT/{/^(START|END) OF TEXT/!p}' infile
-n prevents sed from printing as a default. The rest works as follows:
/^START OF TEXT/,/^END OF TEXT/ { # For lines between these two matches
/^\(START\|END\) OF TEXT/!p # If the line does NOT match, print it
}
This works with GNU sed and might require some tweaking to run with other seds.