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

No need for awk or perl, only with bash and standard Unix utilities:

cat file | tr -c -d "t\n" | cat -n |
  { echo "count   lineNum"
    while read num data; do
      test ${#data} -gt 0 && printf "%4d   %5d\n" ${#data} $num
    done; }

And for a particular column:

cut -d "|" -f 2 file | tr -c -d "t\n" | cat -n |
  { echo -e "count lineNum"
    while read num data; do
      test ${#data} -gt 0 && printf "%4d   %5d\n" ${#data} $num
    done; }

And we can even avoid tr and the cats:

echo "count   lineNum"
num=1
while read data; do
  new_data=${data//t/}
  count=$((${#data}-${#new_data}))
  test $count -gt 0 && printf "%4d   %5d\n" $count $num
  num=$(($num+1))
done < file

and event the cut:

echo "count   lineNum"
num=1; OLF_IFS=$IFS; IFS="|"
while read -a array_data; do
  data=${array_data[1]}
  new_data=${data//t/}
  count=$((${#data}-${#new_data}))
  test $count -gt 0 && printf "%4d   %5d\n" $count $num
  num=$(($num+1))
done < file
IFS=$OLF_IFS