Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm new to awk and would appreciate a jump start.

I've got a text doc of people with first and last names, ages, home cities, and a phrase about the individual. I want to parse the text into fields and rows separated by tabs with the field names of - Firstname, Lastname, Age, City, Dollar Amount, and Synopsis.

Here's how the text reads:

- Larry Denman, 54, of Compton, who submitted false claims totaling $3,394 for services to his mother who, in fact, was hospitalized and later died. - Louwanda Hurt, 40, of Los Angeles, who submitted false claims totaling $1,488 for services to her client who, in fact, had died. - Shirley Byrd, 48, of Long Beach, who submitted false claims totaling $2,953 for services to her mother who, in fact, had died. - Rufus Jackson, 34, of Los Angeles, who submitted false claims totaling $6,506 for services to her client who, in fact, had died.

While it may not be elegant, the order appears pretty consistent.

Any help would be much appreciated.

so how should the output look like, and what have you tried?

I want the output to look like this
Firstname\tLastname\tAge\tCitytDollar Amount\tSynopsis\n
xxxx\txxx \txx\txx\t$n,nnn\txxxxxxxxxxxxxx

And, I apologize, but I'm looking for a starting point. But I do appreciate your response.

if you have Python

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env python
for line in open("file"):
    line=line.strip().split("-")
    for item in line:
        if item!="":
            print '\t'.join(item.split(",",3))

output

Code:

 ./test.py
 Larry Denman    54      of Compton      who submitted false claims totaling $3,394 for services to his mother who, in fact, was hospitalized and later died.
 Louwanda Hurt   40      of Los Angeles  who submitted false claims totaling $1,488 for services to her client who, in fact, had died.
 Shirley Byrd    48      of Long Beach   who submitted false claims totaling $2,953 for services to her mother who, in fact, had died.
 Rufus Jackson   34      of Los Angeles  who submitted false claims totaling $6,506 for services to her client who, in fact, h

hope this will help

Code:

awk 'BEGIN{RS="-"}{print $0}' filename|sed 's/,/  /g'

Thanks for both suggestions. These will get me on the path once I figure out what they're doing. I'll deconstruct with a new sed awk book I've ordered.