field count in a delimited string

[patnim17]

Hi,
I have a String delimited by a pipes."|"
eg: yxs|yud|abc|def|ghi

I want to find the count of the fields, so in this case it should be 5.

How can I get it linux/unix?

pat

 

[bdintegrations]

If you look up tutorials on AWK, you will find something like this:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN {
string="yxs|yud|abc|def|ghi";
n=split(string,array,"|");
print;
exit;
}



Business and Data Integrations

http://www.bdintegrations.com/

A Northern Virginia IT Service and Consulting Company

 

[geirendre]

Why not simply:

awk -F "|" '{ print NF }' yourtext.txt

or

echo "abc|def|ghi|jkl|mno" | awk -F "|" '{ print NF }'

 

[patnim17]

thanks that worked like a charm !!

 

[patnim17]

Just out of curiosity..I was also trying to write this one mentioned by "bdintegrations":

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN {
string="yxs|yud|abc|def|ghi";
n=split(string,array,"|");
print;
exit;
}

How do I do this inside a shell script. I poened up test.sh and copied the above in it and it doesn't seem to be working.

pat

 

[Annihilannic]

You would have to paste that in to a separate script file of its own, making sure that the #!/usr/bin/awk -f line was the first line.

To use it in an existing script you could do this:

awk 'BEGIN {
    string="yxs|yud|abc|def|ghi";
    n=split(string,array,"|");
    print(n);
    exit;
}'

Annihilannic.

 

[GunnarD]

Also simple i bash

#!/bin/bash

OLDIFS=$IFS
IFS='|'

Str="Tom|Andy|Jacob|Sid|Pat"

n=`echo $Str|wc -w`;

echo "N=$n";

IFS=$OLDIFS

 

[geirendre]

echo "It|can|even|be|done|like|this" | sed s'/|/ /g' | wc -w