Can someone explain this shell script?

Stanlex

grep "generate_204" | tr '"' '\n' |
grep "generate_204" |sed 's|http:\\/\\/|http://|g' |
sed 's|youtube.com\\/|youtube.com|g' |sed 's|\\u0026|\&|g' |
sed 's|generate_204|videoplayback|g'

What exactly is going on there?

Fenster

Ghetto find and replace on a string related to a YouTube video. What I don't see in the that code snippet is the file or URL that was passed to it to be processed. It should start with the input, something like (but not necessarily):

cat $foo

Starting at this point:

grep "generate_204" | tr '"' '\n' |

1. Search for line containing string 'generate_204' and use replace the " character with the newline (\n) character.

grep "generate_204" | sed 's|http:\\/\\/|http://| g' |

2. Search for line containing string 'generate_204' and use sed to un-escape the protocol part of the URL (http).

sed 's|youtube.com\\/|youtube.com|g' |

3. Search the string modified in part 2 and un-escape 'youtube.com' by changing 'youtube.com\/' to 'youtube.com'.

sed 's|\\u0026|\&|g' |

4. Search the string modified in part 3 and un-escape the ampersand ('&') character, which has interestingly been encoded in a non-standard manner.

sed 's|generate_204|videoplayback|g'

5. Finally, replace the Google status message that we've used to search this string with 'videoplayback'.

Overall, this code looks like it is part of some kind of scraper.