how to count special characters?

[Gemini_2]

what is the shell command to find the number of the certain character

for example, I have a string

1,2,3,4,6

how do I find the number of "," in the string?

thank you

[Pete Randall]

grep ',' string |wc -c


Pete

[RAC_1 · Accepted solution]

echo 1,2,3,46 | tr -cd '\,' | wc -c

[Pete Randall]

Forget that idea, it didn't work.


Pete

[Kent Ostby]

If your data is in the file "inputfile", type:
awk '{FS=",";}{print $NF-2}' < inputfile

If there are no commas, it will issue a "-1 or -2" for that line.

For the line above, it will yield 4

[Jean-Luc Oudart]

Hi

try

A="a,b,c,d,e,"
echo $A | awk -v var1="," '{print gsub(var1," ");}'


Regards
Jean-Luc

[Gemini_2]

thanks everyone for your speedy reply..

"echo 1,2,3,46 | tr -cd '\,' | wc -c"

is a very interesting use of "tr".

May I ask more questions?
can you explain more on "tr -cd"
-c is "first complement SET1", what does it mean?...

[Sandman!]

The "-c" option tells tr what characters NOT to translate..."-c" (complement) option.

For example the following command makes the non-alphabetic characters in a file stand out by translating them to a number sign.

# tr -c '[A-Z][a-z]' '[#*]' < input_file


hope it helps!!!

[Sandman!]

Pasted below is a C program that you can compile and execute for counting commas (or any character with slight modifications) within your input files.

==============================================================
#include
#define SPLCHR ','

main()
{
int nc, c;

while ((c = getchar()) != EOF)
if (c == SPLCHR)
++nc;
printf("Number of commas in the input string is: %d\n", nc);
}
==============================================================

cheers!

[Arturo Galbiati]

Hi,
echo 1,2,3,4|awk -F, '{print NF-1}'

This counts the number of fields separted by ',' minus 1 giving you the number of the separtor.

HTH,
Art

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

*the* command to do so is 'freq' (if you have it). It's one of those lesser used pearls of the ol' unix times

a5:/u/usr/merijn 102 > freq .tcshrc
|nul 0| 1175|@ 6|` 34|
|soh 0|! 3|A 57|a 116|
|stx 0|" 104|B 8|b 75|
|etx 0|# 32|C 39|c 118|
|eot 0|$ 113|D 35|d 102|
|enq 0|% 42|E 99|e 415|
|ack 0|& 28|F 13|f 99|
|bel 2|' 66|G 8|g 25|
|bs 0|( 58|H 54|h 82|
|ht 192|) 60|I 37|i 207|
|lf 253|* 5|J 0|j 4|
|vt 0|+ 11|K 2|k 20|
|ff 0|, 27|L 45|l 138|
|cr 0|- 57|M 70|m 66|
|so 0|. 38|N 47|n 193|
|si 0|/ 199|O 80|o 137|
|dle 0|0 61|P 72|p 128|
|dc1 0|1 33|Q 3|q 3|
|dc2 0|2 21|R 76|r 171|
|dc3 0|3 19|S 77|s 312|
|dc4 0|4 6|T 93|t 278|
|nak 0|5 7|U 28|u 61|
|syn 0|6 12|V 8|v 79|
|etb 0|7 1|W 0|w 26|
|can 0|8 11|X 6|x 17|
|em 0|9 3|Y 14|y 37|
|sub 0|: 72|Z 1|z 1|
|esc 9|; 17|[ 9|{ 17|
|fs 0|< 4|\ 6|| 19|
|gs 0|= 163|] 8|} 17|
|rs 0|> 1|^ 14|~ 10|
|us 0|? 38|_ 25|del 0|
a5:/u/usr/merijn 103 >

freq also supports -a to show the 8-bit characters

Since many systems don't have it, I have included/attached the source code

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

[Muthukumar_5]

You can try as,

echo 1,2,3,4,6 | perl -ne 's/[^,]//g;print length,"\n";'

hth.

[Arturo Galbiati]

Hi,
please, could you assign points?

0 point for this, of course

THX,
Art

[Gemini_2]

After the first person replied me, I assigned the point right away and have not had visiting the forum for a while.

my apology. let me assign some points now.