I'm so sorry Scrutinizer, but as my input is many thousand lines long I did not notice a potential complicating issue that I was wondering if I could get your help addressing. There are time where the desired string between an initial "[" and "<Ob>] contains a space.

So for example, given:

Code:

 PS028,006 [KJ <Cj>] [CM< <Pr>] [QWL TXNWNJ- <Ob>]
 Lexeme     KJ      # CM<      # QWL TXNWN J      #
 PhraseType  6(6) 1(1:2) 2(2.1,2.1,7)
 PhraseLab  509[0]    501[0]     503[0]
 ClauseType xQt0

Which I would pare down with INPUT | awk '$1 ~/^ PS/' to get:

Code:

PS028,006 [KJ <Cj>] [CM< <Pr>] [QWL TXNWNJ- <Ob>]

In this case, the desired output would be:

Code:

PS028,006 QWL TXNWNJ-

or

Code:

PS028,006 [QWL TXNWNJ- <Ob>]

The code you helped me with only gives:

Code:

PS028,006 QWL

Again, I apologize that I did not see the possibility of the space within the desired string until I double-checked the output against INPUT | sed -e 's/.* \[\(.*\) <Ob>\].*/\1/' which gives me the desired string but not the $1 when $1 ~/^ PS/.

Would you be able to help me iron this out?

--- Post updated at 10:02 PM ---

This works well Don except that I represented the desired output strings as "ABC" and "XYZ" which it seems that you took at being a three character string. I should have been more specific and said that "ABC" and "XYZ" represents a string of any length. Thus something like ["some amount of text" <Ob>].