Help converting row data to columns

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I've been trying to figure this out for a while but I'm completely stumped. I have files with data in rows and I need to convert the data to columns. Each record contains four rows with a "field name: value" pair. I would like to convert it to four columns with the field names as column headers and the data from each row in the record below the corresponding column header.

For example:
Original data:

First Name: Gary
Last Name: Larson
DOB: 01/01/2010
POB: US
First Name: Bill
Last Name: Waterson
DOB: 01/01/2009
POB: US
First Name: Scott
Last Name: Adams
DOB: 01/01/2007
POB: US

Convert it to:

First Name Last Name DOB POB
Gary Larson 01/01/2010 US
Bill Waterson 01/01/2009 US
Scott Adams 01/01/2007 US

I would like to know how to do this in awk or sed. Thanks in advance for the help.

2

Perl:

 perl -F':' -alne 'BEGIN{print "First Name Last Name DOB POB"};if ($. % 4){$s.=$F[1]}else{$s=~s/^ //;print $s.$F[1];$s=""}' file

AWK:

awk -F": " -vORS="" 'BEGIN{print "First Name Last Name DOB POB\n"}NR%4{print $2" ";next}{print "\n"}' file
3 
awk -F": " 'BEGIN{print "First Name Last Name DOB POB"}{printf $2" "}!(NR%4){print ""}' infile
4 
echo -e "First Name\tLast Name\tDOB\tPOB"
cut -d':' -f2 file | paste - - - -
5 
awk -F":" '{print $2}' infile |xargs -n4
6

Another Perl:

$ 
$ cat f3
First Name: Gary
Last Name: Larson
DOB: 01/01/2010
POB: US
First Name: Bill
Last Name: Waterson
DOB: 01/01/2009
POB: US
First Name: Scott
Last Name: Adams
DOB: 01/01/2007
POB: US
$ 
$ 
$ perl -ne 'BEGIN {print "First Name  Last Name  DOB  POB\n"}
            /^(First Name:|Last Name:|DOB:|POB:) (.*)$/ && do{print $2," "; $i++}; $i==4 && do{print "\n"; $i=0}' f3
First Name  Last Name  DOB  POB
Gary Larson 01/01/2010 US 
Bill Waterson 01/01/2009 US 
Scott Adams 01/01/2007 US 
$ 
$

tyler_durden

Or maybe you want formatted print:

$ 
$ perl -ne 'BEGIN {printf("%-12s %-12s %-12s %-12s\n","First Name","Last Name","DOB","POB")}
            /^(First Name:|Last Name:|DOB:|POB:) (.*)$/ && do{printf("%-12s ",$2); $i++}; $i==4 && do{print "\n"; $i=0}' f3
First Name   Last Name    DOB          POB         
Gary         Larson       01/01/2010   US           
Bill         Waterson     01/01/2009   US           
Scott        Adams        01/01/2007   US           
$ 
$