On Feb 17 Allen S. Rout wrote:

> >> On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 17:43:20 -0500, Dan Trevino <[log in to unmask]> said:
> 
> 
> > I need to parse a tab delimited text file of several thousand lines.  The
> > first part is easy;
> 
> > cut -f8 file
> 
> > field 8 of this file contains multiple, variable length, sentences enclosed
> > in double quotes.  Example returned by the cut command above:
> 
> > "this is sentence one. this i sentence two.  this ""is a quote that may be""
> > in sentence three."
> 
> > I need to grab the first sentence for further processing (without the
> > period, without the beginning quote mark) into a variable, but am having
> > difficulty. Can anyone suggest an easy way to do this?  I'm open to
> > bash,perl,python solutions, but prefer bash.
> 

So for the example above what you want is:

this is sentence one

Is that right?

Will there always be a quote to start the line?

> 
> $foo = [ 
> '"this is sentence one. this i sentence two.  this ""is a quote that may be""in sentence three."',
> '"this is lalala. "'
> 	 ];
> 
> print  join ("\n", map { /\"([^.]+)\./; $1 } @$foo ) ;
> 

Putting it together with a slight twist to Allen's solution:

cut -f8 file | perl -lne 's/^"([^.]+)\./$1/ or die "no match:$_...";print 
$1'

hope that helps

Jim