<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> 12222005 2039 GMT-5 What this is is the diary of a woman that her years and years of writing was kept on a word processor and then later on a pc. She had hundreds and hundreds of quotes that she came across - some of them pretty unique in their meaning. Most are simple *.txt documents and a few are MS Word that I open with OO. Take this email for example. She writes as simple as we speak back and forth. And then she was just drop in a quote, [QUOTE] The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way, and that's heaven. You get a chance to know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a relationship with your mind. [/QUOTE] And then keep talking from there. I would like to pull them out and have them like this: <pre>The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way, and that's heaven. You get a chance to know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a relationship with your mind. </pre> <pre> The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way, and that's heaven. You get a chance to know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a relationship with your mind. </pre> That way when they are saved to a normal text file, the owner can just do what they like with them afterwards. Ill read up on that awk and someone also mentioned Ruby. Thanks for those suggestions. Wade Mike Bird wrote: <blockquote cite="mid1135284425.16835.360.camel@mgb.bullion.ims" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Thu, 2005-12-22 at 11:09, Wade Smart wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Ok, this may be totally impossible but, I have about 1800 documents that have sentences inside [QUOTE] and sometimes [QUOTE] [QUOTE] or [QUOTE] [/QUOTE]. I don't know how many lines each document has - maybe 8 to 20k. Is there a way to copy all the sentences between the [QUOTE] [QUOTE] or [QUOTE] [/QUOTE] to a new file? </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> sed can probably do that, if the documents are text format rather than some word-processing format and depending upon line breaks and depending upon how you want the quotes to appear in the new file. There may also be an approach of converting the square brackets to angles and then using an XML tool. Why don't you post a small sample input file that covers all the relevant cases, together with how the output file should appear? --Mike Bird </pre> </blockquote> </body> </html>