Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi ,

I am working on a script to replace special characters in ASCII file with '?'.

We need to get count of replaced characters from file. I am new to Awk and i read,

# The gsub function returns the number of substitutions made.

I was trying to replace characters with below code,

Code:

       gsub("[^[:alnum:][:punct:][:blank:]]","?",$0)

but i am unable to capture the count of replaced characters.

Can anyone help me with the code which will capture the count of replaced characters with above command.

I am kind of in hurry... Thanx in advance.

Moderator's Comments:

Use code tags please, ty.

Code:

print gsub("[^[:alnum:][unct:][:blank:]]","?",$0)

Thanx for your quick reply.

That worked.

Can i catch it in a variable ? That would be easier for me.

Sure:

Code:

x=gsub("[^[:alnum:][unct:][:blank:]]","?",$0)

This example write the output to a new file.
After that it prints the number of replaced characters and assigns it to the variable var:

Code:

var=$(awk '{
  .
  count+=gsub("[^[:alnum:][unct:][:blank:]]","?",$0)
  print $0 > "newfile"
  .
}
END{print count}
' file)

If this works , how can i print values. I had tried this option already but i couldn't print value. I tried like

count=gsub("[^[:alnum:][unct:][:blank:]]","?",$0)
then print $count
print $'$count'
etc ,

sorry , if i am asking simple Qs ,but it wasted my whole day..

Code:

count=gsub("[^[:alnum:][unct:][:blank:]]","?",$0); 
print count

In AWK most variables are not preceded with "$".