Hi,

How do I find the count of a specific character in a line?

For eg: If my line is "|a |a |a |b |c"

then looking for "a" should return 3.

Is there a way to directly obtain this?

Thanks and Regards,
M Shetty

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On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 07:03:51 -0800, mshetty wrote:

> Hi,
>
> How do I find the count of a specific character in a line?
>
> For eg: If my line is "|a |a |a |b |c"
>
> then looking for "a" should return 3.
>
> Is there a way to directly obtain this?

For a single character, use 'tr' to remove everything else, and then use
either wc or awk to count what is left.

echo "|a |a |a |b |c" | tr -c -d a | wc -c

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On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 at 15:03 GMT, mshetty@mail.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> How do I find the count of a specific character in a line?
>
> For eg: If my line is "|a |a |a |b |c"
>
> then looking for "a" should return 3.
>
> Is there a way to directly obtain this?

With bash or ksh93:

line="|a |a |a |b |c"
x=${line//[^a]/}
echo ${#x}


With any Bourne-type shell:

set -- `tr -c a ' ' <<.
$line
.
`
echo $#


--
Chris F.A. Johnson                  http://cfaj.freeshell.org/shell
 ========================================
===========================
My code (if any) in this post is copyright 2005, Chris F.A. Johnson
and may be copied under the terms of the GNU General Public License

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Icarus Sparry wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 07:03:51 -0800, mshetty wrote:
>
> 
>
>
> For a single character, use 'tr' to remove everything else, and then use
> either wc or awk to count what is left.
>
> echo "|a |a |a |b |c" | tr -c -d a | wc -c
>

Or only use awk:

PS1> echo "|a |a |a |b |c" | awk -Fa '{print NF-1}'
3

Regards,

Ed.

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On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 at 15:41 GMT, Ed Morton wrote:
>
>
> Icarus Sparry wrote: 
>
> Or only use awk:
>
> PS1> echo "|a |a |a |b |c" | awk -Fa '{print NF-1}'
> 3

Or, without any external command:

(
line="|a |a |a |b |c"
IFS=a
set -- $line
shift
echo $#
)

--
Chris F.A. Johnson                  http://cfaj.freeshell.org/shell
 ========================================
===========================
My code (if any) in this post is copyright 2005, Chris F.A. Johnson
and may be copied under the terms of the GNU General Public License

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

"Chris F.A. Johnson" <cfajohnson@gmail.com> wrote, on Tue, 22 Feb 2005:

> (
>  line="|a |a |a |b |c"
>  IFS=a
>  set -- $line
>  shift
>  echo $#
> )

Note that some shells (including ksh and bash) will give the
wrong answer if there is an "a" at the end of the line:

$ ( line="|a |a |a |b |c"; IFS=a; set -- $line; shift; echo $# )
3

$ ( line="|a |a |c |b |a"; IFS=a; set -- $line; shift; echo $# )
2

There really ought to be a "set -f" in there as well, to prevent
filename globbing.

--
Geoff Clare <netnews@gclare.org.uk>

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Icarus Sparry wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 07:03:51 -0800, mshetty wrote:
>
> 
>
>
> For a single character, use 'tr' to remove everything else, and then use
> either wc or awk to count what is left.
>
> echo "|a |a |a |b |c" | tr -c -d a | wc -c
>

Or use sed to remove everything else:

echo "|a |a |a |b |c" | sed -e "s/[^a]//g" | wc -c

Bill Seivert

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mshetty@mail.com wrote:
>
> How do I find the count of a specific character in a line?
>
> For eg: If my line is "|a |a |a |b |c"
>
> then looking for "a" should return 3.
>

#!/bin/sh -u
line="|a |a |a |b |c"
set x `(printf '%s\n' "$line" | tr -cd 'a';echo) |\
sed -e 's/a/& /g'`
shift
echo $#

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mshetty@mail.com wrote:
>
> How do I find the count of a specific character in a line?
>
> For eg: If my line is "|a |a |a |b |c"
>
> then looking for "a" should return 3.
>
> Is there a way to directly obtain this?
>

If there are consecutive 'a's in the variable line
then some bourne shells might not give consistent results,
because they don't treat word splitting specially if IFS
has characters other than <SPC><TAB><NL>.

A portable way to do it would be:

#!/bin/sh -u
line="aa|a |aa |b |c |aaaaa"
var=`printf '%s\n' "$line" | tr -cd 'a'`
expr "X$var" : '.*' - 1

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