I need some help in extracting data from multiple email messages.

The data looks somewhat like this

User Name: abc
SubDate:070608
CompDate:080608
ItemID1:123
ItemID2:345
ItemID3:678
Remote_Host:111.45.122.65

User Name: xyz
SubDate:050608
CompDate:070608
ItemID1:478
ItemID2:258
Remote_Host:120.22.222.65

and it continues like that. I need the output as
abc,070608,080608,123
abc,070608,080608,345
abc,070608,080608,678
xyz,050608,070608,478
xyz,050608,070608,258

Is it possible to get this kind out output using awk. Please help

Thanks

One way ....

Since I'm using Solaris, I'm using nawk:

#!/bin/ksh
# no error checking
nawk ' BEGIN {  FS=":" }
{
if ($1 == "User Name")
   {
   gsub(" ", "") # get rid of space
   string=$2","  # build the string
   getline # get next line
   string=string$2","
   getline
   string=string$2","
   getline
   string=string$2
   print string
   }
} ' data.file

Thanks for the reply! But the output I got had only the first lines from each record
abc,070608,080608,123
xyz,050608,070608,478

Another problem that I have is that input file,since it is extracted from email contains lot of unwanted stuff like msg body which I dont need to extract.

This assumes that each block starts with "User Name" and ends with "Remote_Host"

#!/bin/ksh
nawk ' BEGIN {  FS=":" }
{
if ($1 == "User Name" )
   {
   gsub(" ", "") # get rid of space
   string=$2","
   getline # get next line
   string=string$2","
   getline
   string=string$2","
   getline
   while ($1 != "Remote_Host")
      {
      if ($1 ~ /^Item/)
         print string$2
      getline
      }
   }
} '  datafile

GNU awk

awk 'BEGIN{RS="";FS=":";OFS=","}
{ 
 for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) {
  if ( $i ~ /ItemID/) {      
      print $2,$4,$6,$(i+1)   
  }
 }
}' file

Thanks nails and ghostdog...I could build on from the suggestions you have provided...Appreciate your help!

Hi all,

Just wonder if you could help. I have a similar problem but in this case, I'd need to modify the script in order to grap just the first line and the last line of each block.

For each block of information, all I need is to display the first and the last row of each block (and skipping other data in the middle).
For example,

User Name:
Remote_Host

Thanks very much for your help.
David