Count occurrences of a char in a string using Bash

Question

I need to count the number of occurrences of a char in a string using Bash   In the following example  when the char is  for example  t  it echos the correct number of occurrences of t in var  but when the character is comma or semicolon  it prints out zero   var    text text text text   num    expr match  var      echo   num

User · Answer

You can do it by combining tr and wc commands   For example  to count e in the string  referee echo  quot referee quot    tr -cd  e    wc -c  output 4  Explanations  Command tr -cd  e  removes all characters other than  e   and Command wc -c counts the remaining characters  Multiple lines of input are also good for this solution  like command cat mytext txt   tr -cd  e    wc -c can counts e in the file mytext txt  even thought the file may contain many lines      Update     To solve the multiple spaces in from of the number   tom10271   simply append a piped tr command   tr -d      For example  echo  quot referee quot    tr -cd  e    wc -c   tr -d

User · Answer

Building on everyone s great answers and comments  this is the shortest and sweetest version   grep -o   needle   lt  lt  lt    haystack    wc -l

User · Answer

awk is very cool  but why not keep it simple  num   echo  var   grep -o  quot   quot    wc -l

User · Answer

also check this out  for example we wanna count t  echo  test    awk -v RS  t   END print NR-1     or in python   python -c  print  this is for test  count  t      or even better  we can make our script dynamic with awk  echo  test    awk   for  i 1   i lt  NF   i    array  i      END  for  char in array  print char array char    FS      in this case output is like this    e 1 s 1 t 2

User · Answer

awk works well if you your server has it  var  text text text text   num   echo    var     awk -F    print NF-1    echo    num

User · Answer

I Would suggest the following   var  any given string  N    var  G   var  g   G    G     G   N - G    echo   G    No call to any other program

User · Answer

you can for example remove all other chars and count the whats remains  like   var  text text text text  res    var         echo   res  echo     res     will print      3   or  tr -dc      lt  lt  lt   var    awk    print length       or  tr -dc      lt  lt  lt   var    wc -c     works  but i don t like wc        or  awk -F    print NF-1    lt  lt  lt   var    or  grep -o      lt  lt  lt   var    grep -c     or  perl -nle  print s    g   lt  lt  lt   var

User · Answer

I would use the following awk command   string  text text text text  char     awk -F   char     print NF-1    lt  lt  lt     string     I m splitting the string by  char and print the number of resulting fields minus 1   If your shell does not support the  lt  lt  lt  operator  use echo   echo    string     awk -F   char     print NF-1

[bash] Count occurrences of a char in a string using Bash

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