Thanks Pyrite, the screen shots make it easier to understand what I'm dealing with.
I found out why Pidgin was showing you as offline - the damn thing had frozen
Had to kill -9 it.
Anyways, from what I can ascertain from Google, the issue with tab spacing is that the version of BSD sed shipped with Macs has a bug whereby \t is not interpreted properly. I found in a forum post that someone "upgraded" sed via a program called Fink
http://www.finkproject.org/, and running "fink install sed" or something like that. A quick glance at the site and a check in the repository, all it's doing is installing GNU sed. What I might try first is replacing \t with an actual tab, as suggested elsewhere on various Mac forums, as the only other way to get it to interpret \t is to wrap it in single quotes. (I wonder how GNU sed will play with that
)
As for the colour issue, the difference between the server stats output and the Vent title output for example, is that the colour escape codes are inserted into the stream via sed, whereas in the areas it works it's being added after a "echo -e" which enables interpretation of backslash escapes. I'm not entirely sure what is to blame for this difference if the shells are the same - although I did notice your terminal window says "tcsh" not bash.
Either way, I think rather than trying to manipulate the whole file in one go and spitting out the output, what I'll do is read the info into vars, then "echo -e" them back with colour escape codes. All with nice tab indentation of course!
Oh yeah and thanks for the links to the mods and vent data, I'll replace that too.
Looked at some Java stuff... I have no idea how proper programming languages work