How to extract text from a string using sed?

Question

My example string is as follows:

This is 02G05 a test string 20-Jul-2012 

Now from the above string I want to extract 02G05. For that I tried the following regex with sed

$ echo "This is 02G05 a test string 20-Jul-2012" | sed -n '/\d+G\d+/p' 

But the above command prints nothing and the reason I believe is it is not able to match anything against the pattern I supplied to sed.

So, my question is what am I doing wrong here and how to correct it.

When I try the above string and pattern with python I get my result

>>> re.findall(r'\d+G\d+',st) ['02G05'] >>> 

Answer 1

How about using grep -E?

echo "This is 02G05 a test string 20-Jul-2012" | grep -Eo '[0-9]+G[0-9]+'