I'm trying to use tr with multiple sets and not sure how

Question

I have used:

tr -dc [:alpha:] < $fileDoc | wc -c

to count all letters,

tr -dc ' ' < $fileDoc | wc -c

to count all spaces,

tr -dc '\n' < $fileDoc | wc -c

to count all new lines in a text document.

What I would like to do now is to do now is count all other characters in the document as I will call every thing else.

Here is the text from the document:

Hello this is a test text document.

123

!@#

Is there a way to delete everything [:alpha:], , and \n found and count the remaining characters?

iruvar · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-25T03:35:49.980

4

This should do the trick

tr -d '[:alpha:] \n'  < $fileDoc | wc -c

Or perhaps if you want to include tabs in the definition of blanks

tr -d '[:alpha:][:space:]'  < $fileDoc | wc -c

Based on the OP's comment, to delete alphabetical, spaces, digits, and newlines and count all remaining characters:

tr -d '[:alnum:][:space:]' < $fileDoc | wc -c

[:alnum:] accounts for letters of the alphabet and digits. [:space:] takes care of all whitespace including newlines

edited Feb 25 '14 at 03:35

answered Feb 25 '14 at 03:05

iruvar

22,736
7
53
82

@ 1_CR I guess what I should ask is there a way to delete alphabetical, spaces, digits, and newlines and count all remaining characters that I will call special characters? – user3347022 Feb 25 '14 at 03:29
@user3347022, what is your definition of special characters? – iruvar Feb 25 '14 at 03:31
@ 1_CR Sorry just did an edit on original comment. Special characters are everything except alphabet, spaces, digits, and newlines. For what I'm trying to do. – user3347022 Feb 25 '14 at 03:32

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 25 '14 at 05:56

Just posting here for reference, if you wish to do all in one-shot then this awk script should work:

awk -v FS='' '
{
    for(i=1; i<=NF; i++) {
        if($i ~ /[a-zA-Z]/) {alpha++};
        if($i == " ") {space++};
        if($i !~ /[A-Za-z0-9 ]/) {spl++}
    }
}
END {
    printf "Space=%s, Alphabets=%s, SplChars=%s, NewLines=%s\n", space, alpha, spl, NR
}' file

$ cat file
This is a text
I want to count
alot of $tuff
in 1 single shot

$ awk -v FS='' '
{
    for(i=1; i<=NF; i++) {
        if($i ~ /[a-zA-Z]/) {alpha++};
        if($i == " ") {space++};
        if($i !~ /[A-Za-z0-9 ]/) {spl++}
    }
}
END {
    printf "Space=%s, Alphabets=%s, SplChars=%s, NewLines=%s\n", space, alpha, spl, NR
}' file
Space=11, Alphabets=45, SplChars=1, NewLines=4

I'm trying to use tr with multiple sets and not sure how

2 Answers2