Count occurrences of character per line/field on Unix

Question

Given a file with data like this (ie stores.dat file)

sid|storeNo|latitude|longitude
2tt|1|-28.0372000t0|153.42921670
9|2t|-33tt.85t09t0000|15t1.03274200
         


        

Answer 1

To count occurences of a character per line:

$ awk -F 't' '{print NF-1, NR}'  input.txt
4 1
3 2
6 3

this sets field separator to the character that needs to be counted, then uses the fact that number of fields is one greater than number of separators.

To count occurences in a particular column cut out that column first:

$ cut -d '|' -f 2 input.txt | awk -F 't' '{print NF-1, NR}'
1 1
0 2
1 3

$ cut -d '|' -f 3 input.txt | awk -F 't' '{print NF-1, NR}'
2 1
1 2
4 3