[SOLVED] Search for a line containing characters, hyphen and numbers following hyphen with sed

Issue

Let's suppose a file with following content named file.txt is used as a source.

12345
ABC-12
XCD-13
BCD-12345
Some text on this line
*+-%&

What I am looking for with sed would be to get only ABC-12 line and remove hyphen so the desired output would be ABC12

So far I have been able to get numbers only with following command:

sed "s/[^0-9]//g" file.txt

Output

12345
12
13
12345

I got the closest with grep with command: grep -oP 'ABC-\b\d{2}\b' file.txt

Output

ABC-12

How should this be constructed with sed and also hyphen removed from the output?

Note also that numbers after ABC can be considered as changing like a variable so the idea would be to search for "ABC and numbers following it after hyphen" instead of searching for "ABC-12" directly.

Solution

idea would be to search for ABC and numbers following it after hyphen

You may use this sed for this:

sed '/^ABC-[0-9][0-9]$/!d; s/-//' file

ABC12

Here:

• /^ABC-[0-9][0-9]$/!d: Searches input for a line that starts with ABC followed by a hyphen followed by 2 digits and end. All non-matching lines are removed due to !d as command.
• s/-//p: Removes - from the match

---

Update:

As per comment below if ABC- text is not at the start then use:

sed -nE 's/.*(ABC)-([0-9][0-9]).*/\1\2/p' file

Answered By - anubhava

Answer Checked By - Candace Johnson (WPSolving Volunteer)