General :: Grabbing RE From String - Any Utility?

What's the best command to use to grab just a regular expression from some text input? I've got is some input is in the form:

<uninteresting><start-marker><good stuff><end-marker><uninteresting>

I can construct a RE to match <start-marker>.*<end-marker>, but is there a utility that would return *just* the <good stuff> I'm interested in? I realise that the alternative is something along the lines of:

Code:
cat <input-file> | awk -F'start-marker' 'print ${2}' | awk -F'end-marker' 'print ${1}'
but it would be better if I could do it all in one go.