I have a CSV file like this:
abd,123,egypt,78
cde,456,england,45
How can I get the character count of only the 3rd column words?
I can't figure out how to get wc to do this.
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Anko - inactive in protest
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user3116123
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8 Answers
23
awk -F, '{sum+=length($3)}; END {print +sum}' file
Stéphane Chazelas
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Hauke Laging
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3Amen; `awk` was designed for processing column based files, line-by-line. The problem is perfectly suited for the tool. – Ray May 07 '14 at 13:34
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What is the purpose of + in {print +sum} ? {print sum} works just as well. – spuder May 07 '14 at 16:18
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3@spuder, that's to print `0` instead of an empty line when the input file is empty. – Stéphane Chazelas May 07 '14 at 17:09
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3@Ray, on the other hand, the task can be achieved by having 3 basic utilities (each one of them being a fraction of the size of `awk`) cooperating to the case (working concurrently) in typical Unix spirit. You may notice how the cut+tr+wc one is 5 types as fast as this awk one itself 5 times as fast as the `perl` one. (at least on my system, in a UTF8 locale, tried on a 100MB file). – Stéphane Chazelas May 08 '14 at 06:00
23
cut -d, -f3 | tr -d '\n' | wc -m
(remember that wc -c counts bytes, not characters:
$ echo a,1,españa,2 | cut -d, -f3 | tr -d '\n' | wc -c
7
$ echo a,1,españa,2 | cut -d, -f3 | tr -d '\n' | wc -m
6
)
Stéphane Chazelas
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3@mikeserv, which I interpret as _I wasn't able to get `wc` to give me the character count_ which is why I show how to use `wc` in this context. – Stéphane Chazelas May 07 '14 at 13:40
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Oh.... That is a *very* valid interpretation which never at all occurred to me... – mikeserv May 07 '14 at 13:41
5
A perl solution:
perl -Mopen=:locale -F, -anle '$sum += length($F[2]); END{print $sum}' file
or a shorter version:
perl -Mopen=:locale -F, -anle '$sum += length($F[2])}{print $sum' file
cuonglm
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Note that it returns a byte count, not necessarily a character count. – Stéphane Chazelas May 07 '14 at 12:36
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@StephaneChazelas: length() return the logical characters count, not physical bytes according to perldoc. – cuonglm May 07 '14 at 12:50
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But you need `-Mopen=:locale` for `perl` to use the user/system's definition of what a character is, otherwise it assumes characters are bytes. Try on a `a,1,españa,2` input in a UTF-8 locale (the default on most systems). – Stéphane Chazelas May 07 '14 at 13:05
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cut -d, -f3 <<\DATA | grep -o . | grep -c .
abd,123,egypt,78
cde,456,england,45
DATA
#OUTPUT
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mikeserv
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3
You could also use
awk -F, '{printf "%s", $3}' file | wc -m
Stéphane Chazelas
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terdon
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1
With your sample file like so:
$ cat sample.txt
abd,123,egypt,78
cde,456,england,45
$ awk -F, '{print $3}' sample.txt | while read i; do echo "$i" | \
tr -d '\n' | wc -m; done
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7
Working with wc to get each line's count can be tricky. You have to call it for each string from column 3 individually which makes it a bit tricky to do what you want. You have to look through each row of your CSV, extract column 3 and then present it to wc to get the character count.
slm
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0
Using sed and awk
sed 's/.*,.*,\(.*\),.*/\1/g' file | awk -v FS="" '{print NF;}'
Example:
$ (echo abd,123,egypt,78; echo cde,456,england,45;) | sed 's/.*,.*,\(.*\),.*/\1/g' | awk -v FS="" '{print NF;}'
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7
Two awk's
awk -F, '{print $3}' file | awk -v FS="" '{print NF;}'
Example:
$ (echo abd,123,egypt,78; echo cde,456,england,45;) | awk -F, '{print $3}'| awk -v FS="" '{print NF;}'
5
7
Avinash Raj
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