Question: Git does not have a way to backup a working copy. (You can use git commit, but that pollutes your repo with backups.) So I use git diff, but it has an issue with Visual Studio 2010 (VS). Sometimes, VS saves C# files as UTF-8, sometimes UTF-16LE. When VS switches a file from one to the other, the git patch file says, "Binary files a/path1/file1.cs and b/path1/file1.cs differ," and git apply cannot restore from the patch file. What's the easiest solution?

Answer: 
What about deleting all the words ending in `:` from the input and printing what's left?

```
$ awk '{ gsub(/[^ ]+: /, "") }1' data.txt
Dean 23 Chicago
Mary 68 New York
Lisa 36 Los angeles
Greg 18 London

```

**Edit:** And as suggested in the comments, perhaps even more to the point is the `sed` equivalent: 

```
sed -r 's/[^ ]+: //g' data.txt   # gnu

sed -E 's/[^ ]+: //g' data.txt   # bsd

```
Piling on the answer, with perl:

To remove the specific labels:

```
perl -pe 's/(?:name|age|hometown): *//ig' file

```

To remove any label:

```
perl -pe 's/\w+:\s*//ig' file

```

`tr` is not the right tool, because it maps *characters*, not words.