Get content between a pair of HTML tags using Bash

Question

I need to get the HTML contents between a pair of given tags using a bash script. As an example, having the HTML code below:

Answer 1

Personally I find it very useful to use hxselect command (often with help of hxclean) from package html-xml-utils. The latter fixes (sometimes broken) HTML file to correct XML file and the first one allows to use CSS selectors to get the node(s) you need. With use of the -c option, it strips surrounding tags. All these commands work on stdin and stdout. So in your case you should execute:

$ hxselect -c body <
  
  
  
    text
    

      text2
      

        text3
      
    
  
  
  HTML 

to get what you need. Plain and simple.