Split data using sed or awk - regex

Question

I have a lot of data I'm trying to split in CSV. My source data has this format:
* USER 'field1' 'mail1#domain.com' 'field3'
* USER 'field1' 'mail2#domain.com' 'field3'
* USER 'field1' 'mail3#domain.com' 'field3'
And here's what I'm trying to get as output:
field1;mail1#domain.com;field3
field1;mail2#domain.com;field3
field1;mail3#domain.com;field3
Rules:
* USER in the begin of the line must be obviously stripped;
field1 and field3 could be an email address, or can contain ';
field1 could be empty ''
the second field is always an email address;
each field has ' on the beginning and ending of the field itself.
My idea was to strip * USER (sed -e 's/^* USER //' could be a starting point), then "find" the mail in "the center" field, and then catch the left side and right side into two vars. Last thing should be to strip beginning and ending ' on the vars.
Unfortunately, I don't have sed or awk knowledge at this level. Any ideas on how to achieve this?
Here an example
* USER '' 'alberto.cordini#generaligroup.com' 'CORDINI ALBERTO'
* USER 'moglie delmonte daniele' 'anna.borghi#rpos.com' 'Anna Borghi'
* USER '' 'annamaria.cravero#generaligroup.com' 'CRAVERO ANNA MARIA'
* USER '' 'patrizia.dagostino#generaligroup.com' 'D'AGOSTINO PATRIZIA'
* USER '' 'piero.depra#generaligroup.com' 'DE PRA' PIERO'
* USER '' 'viviana.dingeo#generaligroup.com' 'D'INGEO VIVIANA'

Answer 1

Update: You can use this awk for the provided input:
awk -F " '" '{gsub(/^ +| +$/, "", $3);
s=sprintf("%s;%s;%s;", $2,$3,$4); gsub(/'"'"';/, ";", s); print s}' file
;alberto.cordini#generaligroup.com;CORDINI ALBERTO;
moglie delmonte daniele;anna.borghi#rpos.com;Anna Borghi;
;annamaria.cravero#generaligroup.com;CRAVERO ANNA MARIA;
;patrizia.dagostino#generaligroup.com;D'AGOSTINO PATRIZIA;
;piero.depra#generaligroup.com;DE PRA' PIERO;
;viviana.dingeo#generaligroup.com;D'INGEO VIVIANA;

Answer 2

Simply:
$ awk '{print $2,$4,$6}' FS="'" OFS=";" file
field1;mail1#domain.com;field3
field1;mail2#domain.com;field3
field1;mail3#domain.com;field3

Answer 3

You could use sed and awk and that would work but like you I don't use those often enough to remember (and I find them clunky). If you need a solution which you can put in a script to run all the time then how about a Ruby solution, I use a regular expression but you don't have to:
sample-data.txt
* USER 'field1' 'mail1#domain.com' 'field3'
* USER 'field1' 'mail2#domain.com' 'field3'
* USER 'field1' 'mail3#domain.com' 'field3'
parse.rb
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
$stdin.each_line do |e|
matches = e.match /\*\ USER\ '([\w]*)'\ '([\w\#\.]*)'\ '([\w]*)'/
if matches != nil
puts "#{matches[1]};#{matches[2]};#{matches[3]}"
end
end
From terminal/command-line:
cat sample-data.txt | ruby parse.rb
p.s. For me if it's a one-time-kind-of-problem, I would use Notepad++ in Windows. I would open the file, then record a macro, and play the macro to the end of the file, done.

Answer 4

sed "s/²/²S/g;s/\\'/²q/g;s/\*[[:blank:]]USER[[:blank:]]\{1,\}'\([^']*\)'[[:blank:]]*'\([^']*\)'[[:blank:]]*'\(.*\)'[[:blank:]]*$/\1;\2;\3/;s/²q/\\'/g;s/²S/²/g" YourFile.csv
Assuming there is no field 1 with ' inside that is/are not escaped

Answer 5

A sed example, it relies on the fact that there are single spaces between quote-delimited fields. If that's not the case then it needs modification to be more "flexible".
To avoid shell quote-escaping which is kind of ugly experience, I would put one liner into a file. -r makes it using extended regexp (avoid quoting ()s). Single quotes inside field1 and field3 are preserved by regexp greediness (eat everything, including quotes until last quote :)
sed -r -f s.sed samp.csv
s.sed:
s/\* USER '(.*)' '([^']*)' '(.*)'/\1;\2;\3/