Characters in a single read


 
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# 15  
Old 08-22-2013
You're arguing something that hasnt' been asserted. Even if you're 100% correct regarding which systems use which default encoding, it's irrelevant if the task involves counting the number of characters in a file (which may be encoded in an encoding that differs from the system default).

wc -c counts bytes. wc -m counts characters. If you care about characters, use -m. There's really nothing more to say except make sure that the correct encoding is in effect when counting characters.

Regards,
Alister
# 16  
Old 08-23-2013
Quote:
Originally Posted by alister
You're arguing something that hasnt' been asserted.
The very, very first post asserts that he wanted to read from a file. His follow up explained that he wanted to do so in fixed sizes.

If he's using shell, the size he needs to worry about for that, is bytes.

If he's not using shell, the size he needs to worry about for that -- is also bytes.

Not characters. Profoundly not characters. Even systems with a weird character size, read in byte sizes.

You're just arguing semantics now, but it doesn't hold up. Sorry.
# 17  
Old 08-23-2013
Quote:
Originally Posted by Corona688
You're just arguing semantics now, but it doesn't hold up. Sorry.
Not at all. I believe you misunderstood the original post.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Corona688
The very, very first post asserts that he wanted to read from a file. His follow up explained that he wanted to do so in fixed sizes.
You are mistaken.

Your first response in this thread, post #3, indicates that you misinterpreted the use of read in post #1 as a reference to the system call of the same name. The OP's follow up, post #4, indicates that read instead refers to a line.

Quote:
Originally Posted by rajivn786
How many characters are in a single read?
In that question, "read" refers to a line.

Quote:
Originally Posted by rajivn786
Each line is called a read, containing a number of characters.
The task is to determine the length of a single line of text by counting letters (presumably all lines are the same length).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Corona688
Even systems with a weird character size, read in byte sizes.
You are absolutely correct, but the read syscall is not relevant here.

Regards,
Alister
# 18  
Old 08-23-2013
Quote:
Originally Posted by alister
You are absolutely correct, but the read syscall is not relevant here.
Please explain how he's going to read a line without it.
# 19  
Old 08-23-2013
Quote:
Originally Posted by Corona688
Please explain how he's going to read a line without it.
I did not say that read(2) is not necessary, only that it is irrelevant. What's relevant to correctly counting the number of characters in a line is the correct locale and inspection by a locale-aware interface, such as mbrtowc(3) and friends. Using -m provides the latter.

By the way, none of the OP's posts mention reading a fixed quantity (and none use the word byte). The very solution you were assisting with, head piped into wc, makes it clear that a fixed-size read is not part of the equation.

Regards,
Alister
# 20  
Old 08-26-2013
Thanks for the replies guys..
I have done bit of research & found that wc -m counts characters while wc -c counts the bytes..
Is byte a character in general in this context??? Because both give the same results.
# 21  
Old 08-26-2013
A ASCII character is represented by a single byte. A unicode character is represented by more than one byte. It all depends what you need this information for. Is it possible that you will have international characters in your file?
Maybe an example using the unicode character ä makes it more clear to you:
Code:
$ echo "äbc" |wc -c
5
$ echo "äbc" |wc -m
4


Last edited by cero; 08-26-2013 at 10:26 AM..
 
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