so i'm using the following to count spaces leading up to a character:

Code:

awk -F'[^ ]' '{print length($1)","NR}'

however, there some files that have a mixture of both spaces and tabs leading up to the character. and there's no way to know in which order (if spaces, then tabs, or tabs then spaces).

i'm using this to get a total of all spaces and tabs before a character:

Code:

awk -F'[^ ^\t]' '{print length($1)","NR}' file

i was wondering if there's a better way to do this. the above code only counts if the line begins with spaces or tabs. i need something to sum up both tabs and spaces that may exist before a character in each line of a file.