Re: [MLUG] count fields

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, mehmood hasan wrote:

> I want to count No. of filled fields in any row
> i am seeking a query that returns me the number of filled fields in a row;
> any one can help me

It depends on the delimiter.  If the delimiter is white space (spaces and
tabs), then gawk will do it well (except that it ignores initial white
space, but that's often a good thing).  I'm assuming you have a text file.
You do this:

gawk '{print NF}' filename

That will give you 'NF' (Number of Fields) for every line of the file.  If
you are using a single tab as a delimiter, you can do this:

gawk -F'\t' '{print NF}' filename

where '-F' allows you to specify a different field delimiter, and '\t'
represents a tab character.

If you want to see if all lines have the same number of fields, or you
want a frequency count, you can do this:

gawk '{print NF}' filename | sort | uniq -c

By the way, 'awk' does the same kind of thing as 'gawk', but if you are on
some unix systems (e.g., Solaris, at least), awk will fail with more than
something like 32 fields.  Pretty lame.

Let us know if that doesn't help you.

Mike
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