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Here is an example block of text from a file:

Now is the time for all blah:1; to come to the aid
Now is the time for all blah:1; to come to the aid
Now is the time for all blah:1; to come to the aid
Now is the time for all blah:10; to come to the aid
Go to your happy place blah:100; to come to the aid
Go to your happy place blah:4321; to come to the aid
Go to your happy place blah:4321; to come to the aid
Now is the time for all blah:4321; to come to the aid
Now is the time for all blah:9876; to come to the aid
Now is the time for all blah:108636; to come to the aid
Now is the time for all blah:1194996; to come to the aid

Question:
How would I extract all unique numbers from lines that have "is the" in them?

I've tried using grep -o -P -u '(?<=blah:).*(?=;)' but it doesn't like the semi colon

You're looking for the K directive to forget about the stuff you just matched.

grep -oP 'is the.*?blah:Kd+'

Then sort -u

Using sed:

$ sed -n '/is the/s/^.*blah:([0-9]*);.*$/1/p' file | sort -u
1
10
108636
1194996
4321
9876

The substitution replaces the contents of all lines containing the string is the with the number between blah: and ;. Lines not containing the string are ignored.

cat file | grep "is the" | awk -F':' 'print $2'|awk -F';' 'print $1'|sort -u

Try this:

grep "is the" file | sed 's/.*blah://;s/;.*//' | sort -u

Explanation:

1. 
   grep gets all lines with "is the" (in any part of the line)


2. 
   sed remove all before ":" and after ";" (you could use sed -e 's/.*blah://' -e 's/;.*//' instead for best understanding)


3. 
   sort sorts lines