Use awk to extract value from a line - bash

Question

I have these two lines within a file:
<first-value system-property="unique.setting.limit">3</first-value>
<second-value-limit>50000</second-value-limit>
where I'd like to get the following as output using awk or sed:
3
50000
Using this sed command does not work as I had hoped, and I suspect this is due to the presence of the quotes and delimiters in my line entry.
sed -n '/WORD1/,/WORD2/p' /path/to/file
How can I extract the values I want from the file?

Answer 1

awk -F'[<>]' '{print $3}' input.txt
input.txt:
<first-value system-property="unique.setting.limit">3</first-value>
<second-value-limit>50000</second-value-limit>
Output:
3
50000

Answer 2

sed -e 's/[a-zA-Z.<\/>= \-]//g' file

Answer 3

Using sed:
sed -E 's/.*limit"*>([0-9]+)<.*/\1/' file
Explanation:
.* takes care of everything that comes before the string limit
limit"* takes care of both the lines, one with limit" and the other one with just limit
([0-9]+) takes care of matching numbers and only numbers as stated in your requirement.
\1 is actually a shortcut for capturing pattern. When a pattern groups all or part of its content into a pair of parentheses, it captures that content and stores it temporarily in memory. For more details, please refer https://www.inkling.com/read/introducing-regular-expressions-michael-fitzgerald-1st/chapter-4/capturing-groups-and

Answer 4

The script solution with parameter expansion:
#!/bin/bash
while read line || test -n "$line" ; do
value="${line%<*}"
printf "%s\n" "${value##*\>}"
done <"$1"
output:
$ ./ltags.sh dat/ltags.txt
3
50000

Answer 5

Looks like XML to me, so assuming it forms part of some valid XML, e.g.
<root>
<first-value system-property="unique.setting.limit">3</first-value>
<second-value-limit>50000</second-value-limit>
</root>
You can use Perl's XML::Simple and do something like this:
perl -MXML::Simple -E '$xml = XMLin("file"); say $xml->{"first-value"}->{"content"}; say $xml->{"second-value-limit"}'
Output:
3
50000
If the XML structure is more complicated, then you may have to drill down a bit deeper to get to the values you want. If that's the case, you should edit the question to show the bigger picture.

Answer 6

Ashkan's awk solution is straightforward, but let me suggest a sed solution that accepts non-integer numbers:
sed -n 's/[^>]*>\([.[:digit:]]*\)<.*/\1/p' input.txt
This extracts the number between the first > character of the line and the following <. In my RE this "number" can be the empty string, if you don't want to accept an empty string please add the -r option to sed and replace \([.[:digit:]]*\) by ([.[:digit:]]+).