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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!elroy!spl1!laidbak!daveb
From: daveb@laidbak.UUCP (Dave Burton)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: A little help with SED please - clarifications.
Message-ID: <1417@laidbak.UUCP>
Date: 20 Apr 88 14:54:05 GMT
References: <5490@sigi.Colorado.EDU>
Reply-To: daveb@laidbak.UUCP (Dave Burton)
Distribution: na
Organization: is pretty bad/My method of
Lines: 37

In article <5490@sigi.Colorado.EDU> murillo@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rodrigo Murillo) writes:
|I need an sed line (or some gory pipeline) to extract the data between
|BEGIN and END.
|	>I have a text file of this form:
|	    [... junk ...]
|	>   BEGIN
|	>     1
|	>     2
|	>     3
|	>   END
|	    [... junk ...]
|	>   BEGIN
|	>     4
|	>     5
|	>     6
|	>   END
|	    [... junk ...]
|Add to that the fact that the data between BEGIN...END is really not
|plain sequential numbers; it is random text.  Sorry I was not more
|clear.  If you have a SED line to deal with the above, I would love to 
|see it.  Thanks.

Awk would be the tool of choice here. Your basic problem is that you
have state in your text file (in,out), and the state changes only on
subsequent lines. It is difficult (probably not impossible) to write
a sed script, though an awk script is trivial. Try:

awk '
/^BEGIN$/ { state = "in";  next }
/^END$/   { state = "out"; next }
{ if (state == "in") print $0 }
' < yourfile

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