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

Answer 2

 $ cat -n test.txt
 1  test 1
 2  you want
 3  void
 4  you don't want
 5  ttttttttttt
 6  t t t t t t

 $ awk '{n=split($0,c,"t")-1;if (n!=0) print n,NR}' test.txt
 2 1
 1 2
 2 4
 11 5
 6 6

Answer 3

You could also split the line or field with "t" and check the length of the resulting array - 1. Set the col variable to 0 for the line or 1 through 3 for columns:

awk -F'|' -v col=0 -v OFS=$'\t' 'BEGIN {
    print "count", "lineNum"
}{
    split($col, a, "t"); print length(a) - 1, NR
}
' stores.dat

Answer 4

perl -e 'while(<>) { $count = tr/t//; print "$count ".++$x."\n"; }' stores.dat

Another perl answer yay! The tr/t// function returns the count of the number of times the translation occurred on that line, in other words the number of times tr found the character 't'. ++$x maintains the line number count.

Answer 5

grep -n -o "t" stores.dat | sort -n | uniq -c | cut -d : -f 1

gives almost exactly the output you want:

  4 1
  3 2
  6 3

Thanks to @raghav-bhushan for the grep -o hint, what a useful flag. The -n flag includes the line number as well.

Answer 6

awk '{gsub("[^t]",""); print length($0),NR;}' stores.dat

The call to gsub() deletes everything in the line that is not a t, then just print the length of what remains, and the current line number.

Want to do it just for column 2?

awk 'BEGIN{FS="|"} {gsub("[^t]","",$2); print NR,length($2);}' stores.dat