I had gotten sick of not being able to do what I wanted to do with sed/awk – partly because I am not too familiar with those – and, was investigating replacements for those. Many people seem to be using perl and since I wasn’t too familiar with Perl as well, I started thinking about using PHP – which I do know. And, that served my needs brilliantly.

This is a simplistic version of my problem & a solution:
I can do the following to get the values for specific params (cid and oid in this case) for requests made, from my access logs:

k7@local:echo "http://example.com?cid=123&oid=435" | php -R 'preg_match("#.*cid=([^&]+)&oid=([^&]+)#",$argn, $matches);if(!empty($matches)) {echo $matches[1], " ", $matches[2], "n";}'
123 435