Re: shell script to parse html and date comp ?

[email protected] wrote:
> I would like to fetch date/time from html file, and use date comparison
> and make an ics/vcal file eventually
>
> the date comes as so:
>
> <tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1">Start Date Time: </td><td colspan="1"
> rowspan="1">20/03/2014 1400 Thursday</td></tr>
>
> is 'grep -o' the way to go ? what regex do I need where I put ???? ?
>
> grep -o '<tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1">Start Date Time: </td><td
> colspan="1" rowspan="1">????</td></tr>'
I would recommend egrep and use the following extended regular expression:

    egrep -o '[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{4}[[:space:]][0-9]{4}'

which gives you output like the following:

20/03/2014 1400
19/02/2014 1553
03/01/2013 0114
03/11/2012 1514

as a contrived example containing four dates as in your example.


> what do I need to do with date to be able to compare it to a date range?
If you use the ISO 8601 format for all dates/times in your script, life will
be a lot easier, e.g.

    convert "20/03/2014 1400" to "20130320T1400", store it in $datetime

Then you can specify a date/time range on the command line as your lower
and upper bounds, $datelow and $datehigh, for comparison purposes, e.g.

    my_date_script.bash  20100101T0000  20141231T2359

and inside the script only accept date/times within range:

    if [ "$datelow" \> "$datetime" -o "$datetime" \> "$datehigh" ]; then
         echo Datetime $datetime is not in range [ $datelow, $datehigh ]
     else
         echo Found datetime $datetime
     fi

Of course, all of this would be much easier to code in python, perl or ruby.

HTH!

cheers
rickw


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Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting

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