I have a text file of lines like:

A=5|B=7|G=4|C=3|P=4|...

In other words, each line is a pipe-delimited set of pairs of strings of the form "X=Y".

What I want to do is find the token starting with "C", and print it and its value (so I'd want to print "C=3" in the example above).

I'm pretty new to sed, awk, etc. - so any help is appreciated.

Note that you do not know which position the "C" string is in. If we did (assuming it was the 13th token), I'd use:

awk -F "|" '{print $13}'

awk -F "|" '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) {
                 if(index($i,"C") ==1) { 
                      {print $i}
                 }} 
             }'

Great, thanks!

echo 'A=5|B=7|G=4|C=3|P=4|' | nawk -F '[|=]' -v c='C' '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) if($i==c) print $i "=" $(i+1)}'

Try...

awk 'BEGIN{FS="=";RS="|"}$1=="C"{print $2}'

A pretty straightforward one:

awk -F'|' '{
for(i=1; i<=NF; i++)
{
if (index($i, "C") == 1)
print $i
}
}' input-text-file

and what if 'A=5|B=7|G=4|CAB=3|P=4|'