Manipulating a file with awk [duplicate]

Question

I have a text file in the following format:

Surname, Forename: Day.Month.Year: Degree

Sellen, Jo: 03.07.1986: MSc CSE

Parfitt, Harry: 20.03.1984: MSc IT

How can I write a shell script that uses awk to read the file (class.txt) like this:

awk '{gsub(/ +/,"\t");print}' class.txt

and outputs the data in the following format, that exchanges the second and third column:

Surname Forename MSc stream Date of Birth

Sellen Jo MSc CSE 03.07.1986 

Parfitt Harry MSc IT 20.03.1984

_{(Don't worry if tabbed columns don't line up)}

Answer 1

It appears your fields are separated with colon-space, so you'll need to account for that in awk's FS variable. You're also manipulating the order of the fields, so you'll want to set OFS in the BEGIN section.

Answer 2

You can try something like this code:

awk 'BEGIN { FS="[,:]" } { print $1, $2, $4, $5, $3 }' input_file

Here, we specify multiple field separators (, and :) using the AWK built in variable, FS. Multiple field separators are enclosed within [].