Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,..

I'm new to UNIX and been learning a lot but still have a lot to learn. I've been trying to figure this one out but I'm stumped. I'm trying to write an awk script for a file that has 5 records each with 5 fields delimited by a colon. Such as..

Name1:State:y:n:y
Name2:State:n:n:y
Name3:State:y:n:n
....

The first field is the persons name, the second field is the state then followed by a y (yes) or a n (no). The output should look like this:

Name:State:2

In other words, I need to add up the y's. So I'm guessing that first I would need to change the y to a 1 and the n to a 0. Then add the 1's and then print -- all using an awk script.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Even just a hint would help a lot. Thanks in advance.

Code:

BEGIN { FS=OFS=":" }

{ count = 0
  for (i=3; i<=5; i++)
    count += "y"==$i
  print $1, $2, count
}

Oh wow!! You are amazing! Thank you soooooo much! I don't think I would've ever figured that out. Now I'll have to go back with what little I know and see if I can figure out exactly how that code works (because I'll have to be able to do this on my own at some point). Thankyou thankyou so much though.

Alternative in Python:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/python
for line in open("input.txt"):
 	name,state,yn = line.split(":",2)
  	print "%s:%s:%s" % (name,state,yn.count("y") )

output:

Code:

Name1:State:2
Name2:State:1
Name3:State:1