Ytdyklly

How can I count the number of occurrences of a substring in a string using Bash?

EXAMPLE:

I'd like to know how many times this substring...

Bluetooth

         Soft blocked: no

         Hard blocked: no

...occurs in this string...

0: asus-wlan: Wireless LAN

         Soft blocked: no

         Hard blocked: no

1: asus-bluetooth: Bluetooth

         Soft blocked: no

         Hard blocked: no

2: phy0: Wireless LAN

         Soft blocked: no

         Hard blocked: no

113: hci0: Bluetooth

         Soft blocked: no

         Hard blocked: no

NOTE I: I have tried several approaches with sed, grep, awk... Nothing seems to work when we have strings with spaces and multiple lines.

NOTE II: I'm a Linux user and I'm trying a solution that does not involve installing applications/tools outside those that are usually found in Linux distributions.

IMPORTANT:

I would like something like the hypothetical example below. In this case we use two Shell variables (Bash).

EXAMPLE:

STRING="0: asus-wlan: Wireless LAN

         Soft blocked: no

         Hard blocked: no

1: asus-bluetooth: Bluetooth

         Soft blocked: no

         Hard blocked: no

2: phy0: Wireless LAN

         Soft blocked: no

         Hard blocked: no

113: hci0: Bluetooth

         Soft blocked: no

         Hard blocked: no"



SUB_STRING="Bluetooth

         Soft blocked: no

         Hard blocked: no"



awk -v RS='' 'NR==FNR{str=$0; next} {print gsub(str,"")}' "$STRING" "$SUB_STRING"

NOTE: We are using awk just to illustrate!

I assume it can be done better with awk, but this is the best I can offer.

grep -zo "Bluetooths*Soft blocked: nos*Hard blocked: no" file_name | grep -c "Bluetooth"

-z makes grep treat the whole file as one line.

-o only writes the output that matched the string and not the whole line.

(in our case with -z that whould mean the whole file)

s matches blank characters and new lines.

Second instance of grep will search only for the word "Bluetooth" in the output of the first grep call.

-c makes grep write the count of matched regex, instead of the matches themself.

It's a bit unclear how you'd like to match (you additional example in the comment above does not shed any light), however assume that you store your string block with the network information inside a file string and the substring block inside a file substring.

Using the following approach, you'd get what I understand you expected: 2 matches.

cat string | tr -s " " | tr 'n' '@' | grep -o "$(cat substring | tr -s " " | tr 'n' '@')" | wc -l

Essentially, both strings are condensed into one line, ignoring whitespaces or tabs, and converting newlines into @. Using the grep -o syntax, we print all the occurrences (-o) of the pattern found.

However, it's unclear if in your example you expect it to match 0 times (exact positional match) or 2 times (ignoring prepended text). This is a very similar solution to what Iskustvo posted here; could it be that we misunderstood your intention?

If you're trying to count matches of a 2-dimensional text fragment, you probably need fuzzy grep.