Extract XML Value in bash script [duplicate]

As Charles Duffey has stated, XML parsers are best parsed with a proper XML parsing tools. For one time job the following should work.

grep -oPm1 "(?<=<title>)[^<]+"

Test:

$ echo "$data"
<item> 
  <title>15:54:57 - George:</title>
  <description>Diane DeConn? You saw Diane DeConn!</description> 
</item> 
<item> 
  <title>15:55:17 - Jerry:</title> 
  <description>Something huh?</description>
$ title=$(grep -oPm1 "(?<=<title>)[^<]+" <<< "$data")
$ echo "$title"
15:54:57 - George:

XMLStarlet or another XPath engine is the correct tool for this job.

For instance, with data.xml containing the following:

<root>
  <item> 
    <title>15:54:57 - George:</title>
    <description>Diane DeConn? You saw Diane DeConn!</description> 
  </item> 
  <item> 
    <title>15:55:17 - Jerry:</title> 
    <description>Something huh?</description>
  </item>
</root>

...you can extract only the first title with the following:

xmlstarlet sel -t -m '//title[1]' -v . -n <data.xml

Trying to use sed for this job is troublesome. For instance, the regex-based approaches won't work if the title has attributes; won't handle CDATA sections; won't correctly recognize namespace mappings; can't determine whether a portion of the XML documented is commented out; won't unescape attribute references (such as changing Brewster & Jobs to Brewster & Jobs), and so forth.