Parsing iw wlan0 scan output

it's generally bad practice to try parsing complex output of programs intended for humans to read (rather than machines to parse).

e.g. the output of iw might change depending on the language settings of the system and/or the version of iw, leaving you with a "manager" that only works on your development machine.

instead you might use the same interface that iw uses to get it's information: the library backend libnl

you might also want to have a look at the wireless-tools (iwconfig, iwlist,...) that use the libiw library.

Here is my final solution based of Sudo_O answer:

$1 == "BSS" {
    MAC = $2
    wifi[MAC]["enc"] = "Open"
}
$1 == "SSID:" {
    wifi[MAC]["SSID"] = $2
}
$1 == "freq:" {
    wifi[MAC]["freq"] = $NF
}
$1 == "signal:" {
    wifi[MAC]["sig"] = $2 " " $3
}
$1 == "WPA:" {
    wifi[MAC]["enc"] = "WPA"
}
$1 == "WEP:" {
    wifi[MAC]["enc"] = "WEP"
}
END {
    printf "%s\t\t%s\t%s\t\t%s\n","SSID","Frequency","Signal","Encryption"

    for (w in wifi) {
        printf "%s\t\t%s\t\t%s\t%s\n",wifi[w]["SSID"],wifi[w]["freq"],wifi[w]["sig"],wifi[w]["enc"]
    }
}'

Output:

$ sudo iw wlan0 scan | awk -f scan.awk
SSID        Frequency   Signal      Encryption
netti       2437        -31.00 dBm  Open
Koti783     2437        -84.00 dBm  WPA
WLAN-AP     2462        -85.00 dBm  WPA