HP-UX

I've a text file which is delimeted by a comma. But there are some commas in side a quoted string. For ex:

My file a1.txt contains:
"ab,bef",a,b,1,2,"abcde",0,

If you look at the above line, the shell script should give me a count of commas which is 7 according to the above example. (Shell script should ignore any commas inside double quotes). Can anybody help me writing a script to achieve this.

Thanks in advance.

try:

Code:

awk ' BEGIN { count=0; quote=0}
    { for (i=1;i<=length($0);i++)
      {
      	  if(substr($0,i,1)=="\"") { quote=!quote; continue};
          if(substr($0,i,1)=="," && quote==0) {count++;}
      }
    }
     END {print count} ' filename

Thanks a lot, it is working.