Printing substrings of a line ? - awk

Ï/Ç mmichaelz@ Ýãñáøå:
> Hi, I have one or severl long lines in a file.
> I'd like to print out substrings in these lines,
> preferably each as a single line. The strings are,
> <a href="http...pdf"> where ... can vary.
> Ideally I'd get out,
>
> http...pdf (string 1)
> http...pdf (string 2)
> ...
> http...pdf (string 3)
>
> Thanks for any help and tips.
> m

Try

awk -F\" '{ gsub(/<a +href=/, ""); gsub(/>/, ""); for (i = 1; i <= NF;
i++) if ($i) print $i }' file.html

mmichaelz@ wrote:
> Hi, I have one or severl long lines in a file.
> I'd like to print out substrings in these lines,
> preferably each as a single line. The strings are,
> <a href="http...pdf"> where ... can vary.
> Ideally I'd get out,
>
> http...pdf (string 1)
> http...pdf (string 2)
> ...
> http...pdf (string 3)
>
> Thanks for any help and tips.
> m
>

a) Can there be multiple occurences of these substrings on one line?
b) Can the text of a substring be split across lines?
c) Can any of the text that delimits the substrings (e.g. "<a href=")
appear within the quoted parts (e.g. <a href="http <a href= .pdf">)?
d) Can the quotation characters appear escaped within the quoted parts
(e.g. <a href="this is a \" character.pdf">)

I assume the text inside the quotes always ends in an explicit
"<dot>pdf" rather than "<anychar>pdf".

Regards,

Ed.