bash: extract URLs from a string - string

Question

So, I am trying to get information out of OS X's "favorite servers" .plist so that I can then decide whether or not I want to add certain servers to it. Some of the information for how this can be done can be found here:
http://jacobsalmela.com/bash-script-set-favorite-servers-in-connect-to-menu/
The problem with this is that you can't, for example, just do
/usr/libexec/Plistbuddy -c "Add favoriteservers:CustomListItems:0:Name string server1.fqdn.com" com.apple.sidebarlists.plist
over and over, because Plistbuddy is not smart enough to do an insert into the array. You have to know how long the array is, and then add things to the end of it, such that when you go to add things you have already determined whether you need to use 0 or 5 or 7 between "CustomListItems" and "Name" up there.
The obnoxiousness of that aside, I'm having trouble just parsing the output from the Plistbuddy print command, which looks like this:
Array { Dict { Name = afp://or-fs-001/vol1 URL = afp://or-fs-001/vol1 } Dict { Name = smb://or-fs-001/vol1 URL = smb://or-fs-001/vol1 } Dict { Name = vnc://or-fs-001/vol1 URL = vnc://or-fs-001/vol1 } Dict { Name = ftp://or-fs-001/vol1 URL = ftp://or-fs-001/vol1 } }
So you have the same URL twice for each entry (I have no idea why there is both a "Name" and "URL" when you can't actually make them different), and they may start with any protocol supported by Finder, which means afp, http, https, smb, or vnc. The first thing I'm trying to do is just split them up into pieces by the "Name" substring so that I know how many entries are in the list, but that results in weird behavior when I use tr for that; it starts cutting out way too many pieces.
Does anyone have ideas for better ways to do this? Can I count the number of times "Dict" shows up?

Answer 1

You can use grep -o to extract interesting parts of the input. An example:
#!/bin/bash
output='Array { Dict { Name = afp://or-fs-001/vol1 URL = afp://or-fs-001/vol1 } Dict { Name = smb://or-fs-001/vol1 URL = smb://or-fs-001/vol1 } Dict { Name = vnc://or-fs-001/vol1 URL = vnc://or-fs-001/vol1 } Dict { Name = ftp://or-fs-001/vol1 URL = ftp://or-fs-001/vol1 } }'
count=$(echo "$output" | grep -o 'Name =' | wc -l)
names=($(grep -o 'Name = [^ ]\+' <<< "$output" | cut -f3- -d' '))
echo $count = ${#names[#]}
for name in "${names[#]}" ; do
echo "$name"
done