grabbing data from columns

i really need some help here, have been asked to write a shell script to grab data from a report, please find attached a sample report that i need to work on, could somebody please tell me how to grab say data from column "Book Value" ?? , i don't know how to get rid of the header above the column headings, please suggest the best approach to solve this problem, any help is greatly greatly appreciated

not really easy
the output file is not constant, not structured
assumin you are on *nix, 'cut' and 'sed' can help you
a) try a position guess, it seem to be constant
' 40,213.03 JAPANESE YEN 1.00'
the length of this string give (maybe) the start pos of the required value
cut -cX,Y filename
where X is strlen of that string and Y is max len of expected output
then pipe this to sed, purging all spec char like spaces,(),komma, punct and so on
cut -cX,Y filename ¦ sed 's/[,\.()]//g;s/ [ ]*$//;s/ [ ]*//g/'
i explain the sed, remember the X Y values are IMPORTANT
a) take off all punctiation and ()
b) kill AT END all spaces
c) kill AT BEGIN all spaces
NOT TESTED, just a guess

thank you very much for your reply , have been asked to use awk tho, any insights anybody

I have no time to study the structure of your file, but if I were you, I would try to write a script that prints out specified lines and specified columns. "KISS" - keep it stupid and simple. It is at least the first approach. Try this:

:
[ $# -eq 4 ] || {
echo "$0: call $0 first_line last_line col_start col_end" >&2
exit 1
}

awk '
NR>='$1' && NR <='$2' {print substr($0, '$3', '$4'-'$3'+1)}
'

Use copy and paste, all these sily apostrophes are significant. Send standard input into the script.

Regards