Parsing artist and track information from the output of ncmpcpp

Question

I am trying to parse the output from ncmpcpp to get the artist and track title.

The output from ncmpcpp --now-playing takes the form of

(MM:SS) %ARTIST% - %TRACKTITLE%

Example:

(4:46) A Perfect Circle - Imagine

Using traditional piping tools available on linux(head, sed, awk, grep) how can I get rid of the info in parentheses and parse the rest?

I have tried using awk, but it is ineffective as band names can contain spaces and thus %ARTIST% can be considered several arguments.

Answer 1

Note that --now-playing takes additional parameter - format of the output string, so you basically need to invoke ncmpcpp --now-playing "%a - %t" (or similar) to get what you want.

Answer 2

If your artist name contains a hyphen, this will fail, but so will anything that relies on the hyphen being the delimiter between the artist and the title

echo "(32:32) Album artist - This is the title - it's hyphenated" |
    awk 'match($0, /^\([0-9]{1,2}:[0-9]{2}\)\s([^-]*)\s-\s(.*)/, r) {print r[1];print r[2]}'

Output:

Album artist
This is the title - it's hyphenated

EDIT

I may have misunderstood your question - if you don't need the artist and title in separate fields, just use this to strip off the time:

echo "(4:46) A Perfect Circle - Imagine" | sed -r 's/^\([0-9]{1,2}:[0-9]{2}\)\s//'

Output:

A Perfect Circle - Imagine