Using lynx in a shell, store dump for further grep

Question

is it possible in bash script to do something like get web page content as a browser using lynx store it in a variable (actually only one network access to the page) and then do many grep to extract information ?

i have tried things like :

content="$(lynx -dump -nolist $url')"
var1=`cat "$content" | grep myre1`
var2=`cat "$content" | grep myre2`

but i mess up between assignations, using quotes, backquotes and so on.

if someone have another solution without lynx: i am searching for something like lynx --dump that is "browser rendering view" (and not wget) and preferably would avoid creating a file on system (or if this is the only solution, how may i proceed to delete this temporary file?)

thank u and best regards

Answer 1

Just fixed your code. And I want to answer to this

but i mess up between assignations, using quotes, backquotes and so on.

• Please prefer $() instead of backticks, usually there is no difference, but one great advantage of $() is that you can nest it. Also in some fonts backticks could look similar to single quotes and if you paste your code to some sites it may break, so $() is more stable.
• Always place " " around parameters. Examples: echo "$myvar" , wget "$myurl"
• Use [[ ]] instead of [. [ is a test command located in /bin/test (and /bin/[ is usually symlinked to /bin/test), while [[ ]] is bash syntax. (However it seems like [ is a bash builtin now)
• Do not use let for math operations, use (( )). Examples: (( a = 5 * b )) , echo $(( a / 20 ))
• Use (( )) for math comparisons instead of [[ ]] since it allows intuitive <= < > >= operators. Example: if (( a <= b )); then ... instead of if [[ $a -le $b ]]; then ...
• Prefer bash string manipulations instead of tr and other utilities. Some of them and A bit more. Example: use ${myvar^^} instead of echo "$myvar" | tr a-z A-Z
• Most of the commands allow you to specify filename. For example, do not use cat filename | grep somestr , use grep somestr filename instead.

Your fixed code:

content=$(lynx -dump -nolist "$url")
var1=$(grep myre1 <<< "$content")
var2=$(grep myre2 <<< "$content")