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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Finding most common substrings Post 302889669 by Don Cragun on Sunday 23rd of February 2014 12:05:14 AM
Old 02-23-2014
With the simple awk program:
Code:
#!/bin/ksh
awk '
NR > 1 {for(i = length($2) - 5; i >= 1; i--)
                c[substr($2, i, 6)]++
}
END {   for(i in c)
                print c[i], i | "sort -rn"
}' file

and with file containing the data you provided in message #1, the output produced is:
Code:
13 byebye
8 yebyeb
8 ebyeby
5 ypehel
5 typehe
5 pehell
5 llobye
5 hellob
5 elloby
5 ehello
5 catcat
4 tcatdo
4 ogcatc
4 gcatca
4 dogcat
4 catdog
4 atcatd
3 yedogc
3 ogbyeb
3 obyedo
3 lobyed
3 gbyeby
3 edogca
3 dogbye
3 byedog
2 tdogby
2 obyeby
2 lobyeb
2 atdogb
1 ttypeh
1 tdogdo
1 tcatty
1 ogdogb
1 gdogby
1 dogdog
1 cattyp
1 attype
1 atdogd
1 atcatt

so "byebye" is indeed the most common six character substring in the 2nd column of your input. But "catdog" and "typehe" don't even come close. To just print the most commonly occurring substring or (if more than one substring appears the same number of times as the first most common substring) substrings, try:
Code:
#!/bin/ksh
awk '
NR > 1 {for(i = length($2) - 5; i >= 1; i--)
                c[substr($2, i, 6)]++
}
END {   for(i in c)
                print c[i], i | "sort -rn"
}' file | awk '
NR == 1 {c = $1}
$1 == c {print $2}'

which just prints:
Code:
byebye

If you want to try this on a Solaris/SunOS system, change awk from the default /usr/bin/awk to /usr/xpg4/bin/awk, /usr/xpg6/bin/awk, or nawk.

I use the Korn shell, but any shell that supports basic Bourne shell or POSIX standard shell syntax can be used instead.
This User Gave Thanks to Don Cragun For This Post:
 

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