Text processing question

Question

I have a vCard file that I need to modify by removing all non-digit characters from telephone numbers.
Here's the exact process that needs to occur:
If a line begins with "TEL", then remove all non-digit characters from the portion of the line following ":".  (Every line contains only one colon.)
I have no experience with sed or awk, but I was able to hack a solution together using awk:
awk -F: '/^TEL/ { gsub(/[^[:digit:]]/, "", $2); print $1 ":" $2 } !/^TEL/ { print }'
Is there a simpler way to accomplish my goal?  The code above feels somewhat redundant.
I initially attempted to use sed, but I couldn't figure out how to remove non-digits from only part of a line.
-David

Answer 1

Haha, I blame that it was late when I began coding it, but it's a simple move of a ^ as you've already done.
The explanation of tx is that I could only get the s/// to substitute the first number of digits, eg TEL11:22x33 -> TEL11:x33 instead of -> TEL11:x
so what I do is that in the beginning I define a label x, with ":x" and in the end I jump to label x if a s/// successfully substituted something with "tx".
IE
"TEL11:22x33" --[s///]-> "TEL11:x33"
s/// was successfull, jump to x
"TEL11:x33" --[s///]-> "TEL11:x"
s/// was successfull, jump to x
"TEL11:x" --[s///]-> "TEL11:x"
s/// was unsuccessfull, parse next next row of input
Last edited by tlvb (2009-09-13 13:13:58)