sed: Getting Two Extra Characters in the Results

Question

How can I display the next two characters from sed results (wildcard characters and then stop the results)?

echo 'this is a test line' | sed 's/^.*te*/te../'

Expecting test

Actual results te.. line

Answer 1

You can use

sed -n 's/.*\(te..\).*/\1/p' <<< 'this is a test line'

See the online demo. Here,

• -n - suppresses the default line output
• .*\(te..\).* - matches any zero or more chars, then captured into Group 1 te and any two chars, and then matches the rest of the string
• \1 - replaces the whole match with the value of Group 1
• p - only prints the result of the substitution.

Answer 2

GNU AWK solution

echo 'this is a test line' | awk 'BEGIN{FPAT="te.."}{print $1}'

output

test

Explanation: Inform AWK to detect fields like te.. using FPAT (Field PATtern) then just print 1st field.

(tested in GNU Awk 5.0.1)