You don't need sed, you can do it all in jq: curl -sS 'https://www.google.com/complete/search?client=hp&hl=en&xhr=t&q=aurora' | jq -r '.[1] | .[][0] | sub(

You don't need sed, you can do it all in jq: curl -sS 'https://www.google.com/complete/search?client=hp&hl=en&xhr=t&q=aurora' | jq -r '.[1] | .[][0] | sub("</?b>"; ""; "gi")'