Parse HTML snippet with awk

Question

I am trying to parse an HTML document with awk.

The document contains several <div class="p_header_bottom"></div blocks

 <div class="p_header_bottom">
    <span class="fl_r"></span>
    287,489 people
  </div>
  <div class="p_header_bottom">
    <span class="fl_r"></span>
    5 links
  </div>

I am using

awk '/<div class="p_header_bottom">/,/<\/div>/'

to receive all such div's.

How I can get 287,489 number from first one?

Actually awk '/<\/span>/,/people/' doesn't work correctly.

Answer 1

With gawk, and assuming that the only digits and commas within each <div> </div> block occur in the numeric portion of interest

awk -v RS='<[/]?div[^>]*>' '/span/ && /people/{gsub(/[^[:digit:],]/, ""); print}' file.txt