Text File data parsing lines and output as columns

Question

I'm trying to parse a test file. the file has username, address and phone in the following format:

Name: John Doe1
address : somewhere
phone: 123-123-1234

Name: John Doe2
address : somewhere
phone: 123-123-1233

Name: John Doe3
address : somewhere
phone: 123-123-1232

Only for almost 10k users: ) what I would like to do is convert those rows to columns, for example:

Name: John Doe1                address : somewhere          phone: 123-123-1234
Name: John Doe2                address : somewhere          phone: 123-123-1233
Name: John Doe3                address : somewhere          phone: 123-123-1232

I would prefer to do it in bash but if you know how to do it in python that would be great too, the file that has this information is in /root/docs/information. Any tips or help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

One way with GNU awk:

awk 'BEGIN { FS="\n"; RS=""; OFS="\t\t" } { print $1, $2, $3 }' file.txt

Results:

Name: John Doe1     address : somewhere     phone: 123-123-1234
Name: John Doe2     address : somewhere     phone: 123-123-1233
Name: John Doe3     address : somewhere     phone: 123-123-1232

Note that, I've set the output file separator (OFS) to two tab characters (\t\t). You can change this to whatever character or set of characters you please. HTH.

Answer 2

With a short Perl one-liner :

$ perl -ne 'END{print "\n"}chomp; /^$/ ? print "\n" : print "$_\t\t"' file.txt

OUTPUT

Name: John Doe1         address : somewhere             phone: 123-123-1234
Name: John Doe2         address : somewhere             phone: 123-123-1233
Name: John Doe3         address : somewhere             phone: 123-123-1232