How to get the length of each word in a column without AWK, sed or a loop?

Question

Is it even possible? I currently have a one-liner to count the number of words in a file. If I output what I currently have it looks like this:

3 abcdef
3 abcd
3 fec
2 abc

This is all done in 1 line without loops and I was thinking if I could add a column with length of each word in a column. I was thinking I could use wc -m to count the characters, but I don't know if I can do that without a loop?

As seen in the title, no AWK, sed, perl.. Just good old bash.

What I want:

3 abcdef 6
3 abcd 4
3 fec 3
2 abc 3

Where the last column is length of each word.

Thought of `expr length WORD` for using shell builtin only and not calling out for `wc`? — rpy, Apr 19 '16 at 19:41

Rany Albeg Wein · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-19T19:49:52.377

3

while read -r num word; do
    printf '%s %s %s\n' "$num" "$word" "${#word}"
done < file

edited Apr 19 '16 at 19:49

answered Apr 19 '16 at 19:37

Rany Albeg Wein

3,304
3
16
26

I like this solution better than mine. It's more elegant. – zedfoxus Apr 19 '16 at 19:46
2

Though `awk '{print $1, $2, length($2)} file'` will run much faster. – Rany Albeg Wein Apr 19 '16 at 19:54
@RanyAlbegWein That wouldn't work for inputs with spaces: `1 hello world` -> `1 hello 5` but should be `1 hello world 11` – Andreas Louv Apr 19 '16 at 20:11
@andlrc Can be easily fixed if OP wants this behavior. From the question I understood that he/she's asking for a single word size. Thanks for emphasizing this. – Rany Albeg Wein Apr 19 '16 at 20:13

zedfoxus · Answer 2 · 2016-04-19T19:45:41.353

3

You can do something like this also:

File

> cat test.txt

3 abcdef
3 abcd
3 fec
2 abc

Bash script

> cat test.txt.sh

#!/bin/bash

while read line; do
  items=($line) # split the line
  strlen=${#items[1]} # get the 2nd item's length
  echo $line $strlen # print the line and the length
done < test.txt

Results

> bash test.txt.sh

3 abcdef 6
3 abcd 4
3 fec 3
2 abc 3

edited Apr 19 '16 at 19:45

answered Apr 19 '16 at 19:39

zedfoxus

35,121
5
64
63

How to get the length of each word in a column without AWK, sed or a loop?

2 Answers2