Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello all,

I have some text formatted as follows

Name: John doe
Company:

Address 1: 7 times the headache
Address 2:
City: my city
State/Province: confusion
Zip/Postalcode: 12345

and I'm trying to figure out how I could extract the data after the colon so that the result would be

John doe
7 times the headache
my city
confusion
12345

I am not really familiar with shell scripting I am a real newbie

thanks
Mike

One of many solutions ..

Code:

sed 's/*:\(.*\)/\1/' file

wow that's cool

let me try to go through this code

sed is the shell command

s/ = search
*: = anything then a colon
\(.*\) = the back slashes tell sed not to process the bracket ?
and the .* means anything after the colon
/\1/ and this means only one line ?

how would I modify this to ignore empty lines and lines where after the colon there is nothing

also lets say I didn't want a line that was formatted in the same manner ?

thanks again
Mike

Code:

awk -F: ' { if ( NF == 2 && $2 != ""  ) { print substr($2,2)}  } ' FILENAME

Choose only lines where one ":" exists and
after ":" is not null
print field after ": " (substr command)

Code:

awk -F: '$2{print substr($2,2)}' file

sed 's/^.*://;/^$/d;s/^ //' file

For sed you should read Sed - An Introduction and Tutorial

Code:

echo "Zip/Postalcode: 12345" | sed 's/^.*://'

so I've got almost everything I need here is the code I'm using

Code:

awk -F: ' { if (  $1 != "Email" && $2 !=""  && $2 != " " ) { print substr($2,2)}  }' '/private/tmp/shipping.txt'

only the program that is writing the text file is leaving something in the blank lines so my result looks like this
"

Jane Doe

7 times the headache

Some City
Connecticut
06032

"
I am on a mac and writing the file using apple script alternatively if I could just hand awk the text rather than specifying a file that may fix the problem


thanks for all your help
Mike