I just want to echo an incremented string length. For example:
STR="test"
echo ${#STR}
It prints 4, but I want to print 5.
STR="test"
count=${#STR}
((count++))
echo $count
((count++)): How to increment a variable in bash?
The length of the string cannot be changed without modifying the string. If you want to add another character at the beginning, try
STR="a$STR"
Now ${#STR} is 5, because STR is atest (five characters).
If you want to perform arithmetic in the shell, use an arithmetic expression:
echo "$((1+${#STR}))"
Related
I have an array that has three types of data in it, integer, integer/integer, and the string value.
I have shown a sample below.
myarr = (2301/2320,Team Lifeline, 2311, 7650/7670, 232)
I have the following algorithm that I want to come up with.
For index in myarr
if index contains data as number1/number2; then
create an array, "mynumbers" to hold all the numbers starting from number1 to number2
else if index is a string
add it in "mystrarr"
else
add it in "myintarr"
done
For the first case, if I have an enter in the myarr as 2301/2320,
then the mynumbers as shown in the pseudocode will have entries from {2301, 2302, ... , 2320}. I am not able to understand on how to parse the entry in myarr and identify that it has a / in the array.
For the second situation, I am also not sure on how to identify if the entry in the myarr and know it is a string. mystrarr should have {Team Lifeline}.
For the final case, the myintarr should have {2311, 232}.
Any help would be appreciated. I am very new to shell script.
Stack Overflow is not a coding service.... but I was bored so here you go...
#!/bin/bash
myarr=(2301/2320 'Team Lifeline' 2311 7650/7670 232)
for element in "${myarr[#]}"; do
if [[ $element =~ ^[0-9]+/[0-9]+$ ]]; then
range="{${element%/*}..${element##*/}}"
mynumbers=( $(eval "echo $range") )
elif [ $element -eq $element ] 2>> /dev/null; then
intarr+=( $element )
else
strarr+=( "$element" )
fi
done
echo "mynumbers = ${mynumbers[*]}"
echo "intarr = ${intarr[*]}"
echo "strarr = ${strarr[*]}"
A lot to unpack here for inexperienced. So ask questions where I didn't cover anything. Things to note:
All assignments there are no spaces around =.
Array assignments are of the format ( element1 element2 ... )
Appending to arrays with +=(...) format
Looping through array elements for element in "${myarr[#]}"
Note that the array generated by 7650/7670 will overwrite the array generated by 2301/2320. I assume you have some kind of plan for this array, so I didn't do anything to stop it from being overwritten.
More details
This line is validating the format for 111/222:
if [[ $element =~ ^[0-9]+/[0-9]+$ ]]; then
[[ x =~ x ]] performs a regex comparison and this regex essentially just means:
^ - beginning of the string
[0-9]+ - Atleast 1 number
/ - character literal
$ - end of string
These lines are expanding your beginning and ending numbers:
range="{${element%/*}..${element##*/}}"
mynumbers=( $(eval "echo $range") )
This is maybe more complicated than it needs to be as most people try to avoid eval in general for security reasons. I'm leveraging bash's brace expansion. If you run echo {5..9}, it will output 5 6 7 8 9. This does not trigger with variables, so I cheated and used eval.
This line is checking if we are dealing with an integer:
[ $element -eq $element ] 2>> /dev/null
This works by running an integer -eq (equals) comparison on the variable against itself. This will actually fail and throw an error message on anything but an integer. This is not the way it was designed to be used which is why we discard all the error messages (2>> /dev/null).
This is a nice succinct script, but is using some unconventional practices. A longer more verbose version may be better for a beginner.
You can use regular expressions to match elements that are nothing but digits, or digits/digits, and assume everything else is a string:
#!/bin/bash
myarr=(2301/2320 "Time Lifeline" 2311 7650/7670 232)
declare -a mynumbers mystrarr myintarr
for elem in "${myarr[#]}"; do
if [[ $elem =~ ^([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)$ ]]; then
mynumbers+=($(seq ${BASH_REMATCH[1]} ${BASH_REMATCH[2]}))
elif [[ $elem =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
myintarr+=($elem)
else
mystrarr+=("$elem")
fi
done
echo mynumbers is "${mynumbers[#]}"
echo myintarr is "${myintarr[#]}"
echo mystrarr is "${mystrarr[*]}"
Jason explained a lot in his (very similar; there's only so many obvious ways to do this) answer, so to expand on where ours are different:
We both use regular expressions to match the integer/integer case, but he then goes on to extract the two numbers using parameter expansion with pattern removal options, while mine captures the two integers in the regular expression, and uses the BASH_REMATCH array to access their values as well as the seq command to generate the numbers between the two.
I am trying to write a bash script which will read two letter variables (startletter/stopletter) and after that I need to print from the start letter to the stop letter with a for or something else. How can I do that?
I tried to do
#! /bin/bash
echo "give start letter"
read start
echo "give stop letter" read stop
But none of the for constructs work
#for value in {a..z}
#for value in {$start..$stop}
#for (( i=$start; i<=$stop; i++)) do echo "Letter: $c" done
This question is very well explained in BashFAQ/071 How do I convert an ASCII character to its decimal (or hexadecimal) value and back?
# POSIX
# chr() - converts decimal value to its ASCII character representation
# ord() - converts ASCII character to its decimal value
chr () {
local val
[ "$1" -lt 256 ] || return 1
printf -v val %o "$1"; printf "\\$val "
# That one requires bash 3.1 or above.
}
ord() {
# POSIX
LC_CTYPE=C printf %d "'$1"
}
Re-using them for your requirement, a proper script would be written as
read -p "Input two variables: " startLetter stopLetter
[[ -z "$startLetter" || -z "$stopLetter" ]] && { printf 'one of the inputs is empty\n' >&2 ; }
asciiStart=$(ord "$startLetter")
asciiStop=$(ord "$stopLetter")
for ((i=asciiStart; i<=asciiStop; i++)); do
chr "$i"
done
Would print the letters as expected.
Adding it to community-wiki since this is also a cross-site duplicate from Unix.SE - Bash script to get ASCII values for alphabet
In case you feel adventurous and want to use zsh instead of bash, you can use the following:
For zsh versions below 5.0.7 you can use the BRACE_CCL option:
(snip man zshall) If a brace expression matches none of the above forms, it is left
unchanged, unless the option BRACE_CCL (an abbreviation for 'brace character class') is set. In that case, it is expanded to a list of the individual characters between the braces sorted into the order of the characters in the ASCII character set (multibyte characters are not currently handled). The syntax is similar to a [...] expression in filename generation: - is treated specially to denote a range of characters, but ^ or ! as the first character is treated normally. For example, {abcdef0-9}
expands to 16 words 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f.
#!/usr/bin/env zsh
setopt brace_ccl
echo "give start letter"
read cstart
echo "give stop letter"
read cstop
for char in {${cstart}-${cstop}}; do echo $char; done
For zsh versions from 5.0.7 onwards you can use the default brace expansion :
An expression of the form {c1..c2}, where c1 and c2 are single characters (which may be multibyte characters), is expanded to every character in the range from c1 to c2 in whatever character sequence is used internally. For characters with code points below 128 this is US ASCII (this is the only case most users will need). If any intervening character is not printable, appropriate quotation is used to render it printable. If the character sequence is reversed, the output is in reverse order, e.g. {d..a} is substituted as d c b a.
#!/usr/bin/env zsh
echo "give start letter"
read cstart
echo "give stop letter"
read cstop
for char in {${cstart}..${cend}; do echo $char; done
More information on zsh can be found here and the quick reference
I have a need for a simple function to do the following:
#!/bin/bash
select_word() {
echo "Enter a string."
read STRING
## User enters "This is a string."
## Here will be the command to set each word to the below variables.
WORD_1=
WORD_2=
WORD_3=
WORD_4=
echo -e "Word 1 is: $WORD_1.\n Word 2 is: $WORD_2.\n"
echo -e "Word 3 is: $WORD_3.\n Word 4 is: $WORD_4.\n"
}
I am wanting to avoid using external tools such as sed or awk. Looking for bash builtin functions to use in order to pull each word from the string and set that word as a variable value. I will later use "wc" to count the number of characters in each word. I already know how to do that, I just need to know the bash method to pulling a word from user input strings.
If this question is a duplicate, I apologize as I could not find this specific question.
read can split the string itself.
read -r WORD1 WORD2 WORD3 WORD4
If you enter fewer than 4 words, the last variable(s) will be set to empty strings. If you enter more than 4 words, WORD4 will be the rest of the string, not just the 4th word.
You can also split the string into an array, if you don't know how many words will be entered ahead of time.
read -a words
WORD1=${words[0]}
WORD2=${words[1]}
WORD3=${words[2]}
WORD4=${words[3]}
You can convert the space delimited $STRING into an array, and then reference each array element in $WORD_n variables:
WORDS=($STRING)
WORD_1=${WORDS[0]}
WORD_2=${WORDS[1]}
Of with set -f, which will disable globing (e.g. changing * to list of files in current directory):
set -f
WORDS=($STRING)
set +f
WORD_1=${WORDS[0]}
WORD_2=${WORDS[1]}
If you need to be independent of the number of words typed, you can do:
#!/bin/bash
select_word() {
echo "Enter a string."
read STRING
## User enters "This is a string."
GENERAL_VAR_NAME="WORD_"
## Here will be the command to set each word to the below variables.
# Split string into an array, default delimiter whitespace
STRING=( $STRING )
# Number of array elements: ${#STRING[#]}
for (( c=1; c<=${#STRING[#]}; c++ ))
do
#echo -e "WORD $c is: ${STRING[$c]}"
NEW_WORD=`echo -e $GENERAL_VAR_NAME${c}`
printf -v $NEW_WORD "${STRING[$c]}"
done
# Check the output
for (( i=1; i<=${#STRING[#]}; i++ )); do
echo "WORD_$i is $WORD_$i"
done
}
select_word
I know that to loop through the alphabet, one can do
for c in {a..z}; do something; done
My question is, how can I loop through the first n letters (e.g. to build a string) where n is a variable/parameter given in the command line.
I searched SO, and only found answers doing this for numbers, e.g. using C-style for loop or seq (see e.g. How do I iterate over a range of numbers defined by variables in Bash?). And I don't have seq in my environment.
Thanks.
The straightforward way is sticking them in an array and looping over that by index:
#!/bin/bash
chars=( {a..z} )
n=3
for ((i=0; i<n; i++))
do
echo "${chars[i]}"
done
Alternatively, if you just want them dash-separated:
printf "%s-" "${chars[#]:0:n}"
that other guy's answer is probably the way to go, but here's an alternative that doesn't require an array variable:
n=3 # sample value
i=0 # var. for counting iterations
for c in {a..z}; do
echo $c # do something with "$c"
(( ++i == n )) && break # exit loop, once desired count has been reached
done
#rici points out in a comment that you could make do without aux. variable $i by using the conditional (( n-- )) || break to exit the loop, but note that this modifies $n.
Here's another array-free, but less efficient approach that uses substring extraction (parameter expansion):
n=3 # sample value
# Create a space-separated list of letters a-z.
# Note that chars={a..z} does NOT work.
chars=$(echo {a..z})
# Extract the substring containing the specified number
# of letters using parameter expansion with an arithmetic expression,
# and loop over them.
# Note:
# - The variable reference must be _unquoted_ for this to work.
# - Since the list is space-separated, each entry spans 2
# chars., hence `2*n` (you could subtract 1 after, but it'll work either way).
for c in ${chars:0:2*n}; do
echo $c # do something with "$c"
done
Finally, you can combine the array and list approaches for concision, although the pure array approach is more efficient:
n=3 # sample value
chars=( {a..z} ) # create array of letters
# `${chars[#]:0:n}` returns the first n array elements as a space-separated list
# Again, the variable reference must be _unquoted_.
for c in ${chars[#]:0:n}; do
echo $c # do something with "$c"
done
Are you only iterating over the alphabet to create a subset? If that's the case, just make it simple:
$ alpha=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvqxyz
$ n=4
$ echo ${alpha:0:$n}
abcd
Edit. Based on your comment below, do you have sed?
% sed -e 's/./&-/g' <<< ${alpha:0:$n}
a-b-c-d-
You can loop through the character code of the letters of the alphabet and convert back and forth:
# suppose $INPUT is your input
INPUT='x'
# get the character code and increment it by one
INPUT_CHARCODE=`printf %x "'$INPUT"`
let INPUT_CHARCODE++
# start from character code 61 = 'a'
I=61
while [ $I -ne $INPUT_CHARCODE ]; do
# convert the index to a letter
CURRENT_CHAR=`printf "\x$I"`
echo "current character is: $CURRENT_CHAR"
let I++
done
This question and the answers helped me with my problem, partially.
I needed to loupe over a part of the alphabet based on a letter in bash.
Although the expansion is strictly textual
I found a solution: and made it even more simple:
START=A
STOP=D
for letter in $(eval echo {$START..$STOP}); do
echo $letter
done
Which results in:
A
B
C
D
Hope it's helpful for someone looking for the same problem i had to solve,
and ends up here as well
(also answered here)
And the complete answer to the original question is:
START=A
n=4
OFFSET=$( expr $(printf "%x" \'$START) + $n)
STOP=$(printf "\x$OFFSET")
for letter in $(eval echo {$START..$STOP}); do
echo $letter
done
Which results in the same:
A
B
C
D
I have a number 2014061200 and I am trying to extract the one's digit of this number (0) and set it to a variable $STR, so that $STR would equal 0, because that is in the one's place of the above number.
I made a shell script showing the following:
$NUM=2014061200
$STR= $NUM | tail -c 2
echo $STR
However when I do this I get a blank for $STR instead of the expected result of 0. I mean when I type
echo $NUM | tail -c 2, I do get the output of 0, but how do I get this into a variable?
Thanks
Use parameter expansion:
num=2014061200
last=${num: -1}
-1 tells bash to extract one character from the right.
Here's another variation using parameter expansion where ${#num}-1 is the length of the string less 1 and ${num:position:length} is a substring expression:
${num:(${#num}-1):1}