Cut substrings between 2 characters and loop through them

Question

I have the following string:

<(name:John,sirname:Doe),(country:United States)>

And I want to loop through the values between parenthesis, previously removing < and >. First cycle will give name:John,sirname:Doe, and the second one country:United States. But it can have any amount of values. I don't want to use any libraries or things that don't come preinstalled in linux distros.

Answer 1

You can use gnu awk with FPAT to break each field using (...) pattern:

s='<(name:John,sirname:Doe),(country:United States)>'

awk -v FPAT='\\([^)]+\\)' '{
for (h=1; h<=NF; h++) {gsub(/[()]/, "", $h); print $h}}' <<< "$s"

name:John,sirname:Doe
country:United States