将OSX上的文本文件格式化为制表符分隔的文本文件

Question

I have a file that looks like the following, which is outputted from a program i wrote in applescript.

AXTitle: Blah
AXSize: Width: 300
AXSize: Height: 44
AXPosition: X: 217
AXPosition: Y: 170
AXHelp: Blah
AXValue: Value, On
AXEnabled: true
AXFocused: false
AXRole: AXStaticText
AXRoleDescription: Blah
AXTopLevelUIElement: Blah
AXWindow: Blah

I need to put into a format that will be compatible with a database. So a tab delimited format. This is the format i would like to output it in. I don't need all the data above just what i select

123   456   0   1   2   3   4   5   text   text     
123   456   0   1   2   3   4   5   text   text  

I am thinking regular expressions to format text as i need. Can i do this in applescript? If not what programs should i look at considering i am woking on OSX? sed, gawk, perl, python? Can i insert these programs in my applescript program or will i have to run separately?

Answer 1

When you are getting your selected items, just add the tabs as you go. You can also put the items into a list, where you can use text item delimiters to convert to a string with tabs between the items.

set X to {123, 456, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, "text", "text"}
set {tempTID, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, tab}
set {X, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {X as text, tempTID}

X --> result

Answer 2

Here is a good tutorial: http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html

set xxx to "Here is my input" 
do shell script "echo " & xxx & " | sed 's/my/your/'"