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

Answer 1

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 ',' <<<"$var" | awk '{ print length; }'

or

tr -dc ',' <<<"$var" | wc -c    #works, but i don't like wc.. ;)

or

awk -F, '{print NF-1}' <<<"$var"

or

grep -o ',' <<<"$var" | grep -c .

or

perl -nle 'print s/,//g' <<<"$var"

Answer 2

awk works well if you your server has it

var="text,text,text,text" 
num=$(echo "${var}" | awk -F, '{print NF-1}')
echo "${num}"

Answer 3

I would use the following awk command:

string="text,text,text,text"
char=","
awk -F"${char}" '{print NF-1}' <<< "${string}"

I'm splitting the string by $char and print the number of resulting fields minus 1.

If your shell does not support the <<< operator, use echo:

echo "${string}" | awk -F"${char}" '{print NF-1}'

Answer 4

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<=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

Answer 5

Building on everyone's great answers and comments, this is the shortest and sweetest version:

grep -o "$needle" <<< "$haystack" | wc -l

Answer 6

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