Bash Regex Capture Group

Answer :

It's a shame that you can't do global matching in bash. You can do this:

global_rematch() {      local s=$1 regex=$2      while [[ $s =~ $regex ]]; do          echo "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"         s=${s#*"${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"}     done } global_rematch "$mystring1" "$regex"  

1BBBBBB 2AAAAAAA 

This works by chopping the matched prefix off the string so the next part can be matched. It destroys the string, but in the function it's a local variable, so who cares.

I would actually use that function to populate an array:

$ mapfile -t matches < <( global_rematch "$mystring1" "$regex" ) $ printf "%s\n" "${matches[@]}" 1BBBBBB 2AAAAAAA 

To get the second array value, you need to have a second set of parentheses in the regex:

mystring1='<link rel="self" href="/api/clouds/1/instances/1BBBBBB"/> dsf <link rel="self" href="/api/clouds/1/instances/2AAAAAAA"/>'  regex='/instances/([A-Z0-9]+).*/instances/([A-Z0-9]+)'  [[ $mystring1 =~ $regex ]]  $ echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]} 1BBBBBB $ echo ${BASH_REMATCH[2]} 2AAAAAAA