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Find position of character in multiple strings in a file

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# 1  
Old 07-01-2012
Find position of character in multiple strings in a file
Greetings.

I have a file with information like this:
Code:
AMNDHRKEOEU?AMNDHRKEOEU?AMNDHRKEOEU?AMNDHRKEOEU?
AMNDHRKEEU?AMNDHREOEU?
AMNDHREU?AHRKEOEU?AMNDHRKEU?AMNDKEOEU?

What I need to extract is the position, in every line, of every occurrence of '?'

A desired output would be something like:
Code:
1:12, 24, 36, 48
2:11, 22
3:9, 18, 28, 38

I'm using the bash shell
# 2  
Old 07-01-2012
One possible approach: you can use AWK with the field separator set to ?. Then, for each record, inspect the number of fields and their lengths to determine where the ? characters occur.

Analogously, you can do the same thing in the shell using IFS, read, the set builtin, a for-loop, and $#.

Regards,
Alister
# 3  
Old 07-01-2012
Code:
awk '{printf("%d:",NR);len=0;for(i=1;i!=NF;++i){len+=length($i)+1;printf("%d ",len)}printf("\n")}' FS="?" infile

or
Code:
awk '{printf("%d:",NR)}{for(i=1;i<=NF;++i)if($i == "?")printf("%d ",i)}{printf("\n")}' FS="" infile

This User Gave Thanks to complex.invoke For This Post:
Twinklefingers
# 4  
Old 07-01-2012
Thanks, huaihaizi3. The first one worked perfectly!
# 5  
Old 07-02-2012
Quote:
Originally Posted by huaihaizi3
Code:
awk '{printf("%d:",NR);len=0;for(i=1;i!=NF;++i){len+=length($i)+1;printf("%d ",len)}printf("\n")}' FS="?" infile

Just in case, be aware that should a blank line occurr in the data, the initial value of i will be greater than NF and the highlighted expression will never be true, an infinite loop (or at least a loop that runs until a field size limit is triggered by $i). Using < should fix it.

Regards,
Alister
Last edited by alister; 07-02-2012 at 03:37 AM..
This User Gave Thanks to alister For This Post:
# 6  
Old 07-02-2012
Code:
a="AMNDHRKEOEU?AMNDHRKEOEU?AMNDHRKEOEU?AMNDHRKEOEU?"
$ echo $a | fold -w 1 | grep -n "?"

# 7  
Old 07-02-2012
Also to get rid of the spurious space at the end or to be able to specify an output field separator, we could use something like this:
Code:
awk -F? '{p=0; for(i=1;i<NF;i++)s=(i==1?NR ":":s OFS)(p+=length($i)+1)} p{print s}' OFS=", " infile

Last edited by Scrutinizer; 07-02-2012 at 04:57 AM..
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