Question

Hi I am trying to create a script that will count the number of characters between xml tags and idealy group by these values before returning the variations:

eg

<CONTEXT_1>aaaa<CONTEXT_1>
<CONTEXT_2>bb<CONTEXT_2>
<CONTEXT_2>dfgh<CONTEXT_2>
<CONTEXT_6>bb<CONTEXT_6>
<CONTEXT_1>bbbb<CONTEXT_1>

the result of this would be

<CONTEXT_1> 4
<CONTEXT_2> 2,4
<CONTEXT_6> 4

Any help would be much appreciated! I’m totally stuck

Thanks
M

Answer 1

You can do something like this using sed:

sed  's/^<\([^>]*\)>\(.*\)<.*$/\1 \2/g' file.xml | sort | while read line
do
    context=`echo $line | cut -d' ' -f1`
    count=`echo $line | cut -d' ' -f2 | tr -d '\n' | wc -c`
    echo $context: $count
done | uniq

which prints:

CONTEXT_1: 4
CONTEXT_2: 2
CONTEXT_2: 4
CONTEXT_6: 2