Counting characters, words, length of the words and total length in a sentence

Question

I have to write a script that takes a sentence and prints the word count, character count (excluding the spaces), length of each word and the length. I know that there exist

Answer 1

The wc command is a good bet.

$ echo "one two three four five" | wc
       1       5      24

where the result is number of lines, words and characters. In a script:

#!/bin/sh

mystring="one two three four five"

read lines words chars <<< `wc <<< $mystring`

echo "lines: $lines"
echo "words: $words"
echo "chars: $chars"

echo -n "word lengths:"
declare -i nonspace=0
declare -i longest=0
for word in $mystring; do
  echo -n " ${#word}"
  nonspace+=${#word}"
  if [[ ${#word} -gt $longest ]]; then
    longest=${#word}
  fi
done
echo ""
echo "nonspace chars: $nonspace"
echo "longest word: $longest chars"

The declare built-in casts a variable as an integer here, so that += will add rather than append.

$ ./doit
lines: 1
words: 5
chars: 24
word lengths: 3 3 5 4 4
nonspace chars: 19