OK - way late to the table, but... it seems many respondents missed the original spec that all email addresses occur on 1 line. This means unless you introduce a CRLF with each occurrence of the @ symbol, your suggestions to use variants of FINDSTR /c will not help.
Among the Unix tools for DOS is the very powerful SED.exe. Google it. It rocks RegEx. Here's a suggestion:
find "@" datafile.txt | find "@" | sed "s/@/@\n/g" | find /n "@" | SED "s/\[\(.*\)\].*/Set \/a NumFound=\1/">CountChars.bat
Explanation: (assuming the file with the data is named "Datafile.txt")
1) The 1st FIND includes 3 lines of header info, which throws of a line-count approach, so pipe the results to a 2nd (identical) find to strip off unwanted header info.
2) Pipe the above results to SED, which will search for each "@" character and replace it with itself+ "\n" (which is a "new line" aka a CRLF) which gets each "@" on its own line in the output stream...
3) When you pipe the above output from SED into the FIND /n command, you'll be adding line numbers to the beginning of each line. Now, all you have to do is isolate the numeric portion of each line and preface it with "SET /a" to convert each line into a batch statement that (increasingly with each line) sets the variable equal to that line's number.
4) isolate each line's numeric part and preface the isolated number per the above via:
| SED "s/\[\(.*\)\].*/Set \/a NumFound=\1/"
In the above snippet, you're piping the previous commands's output to SED, which uses this syntax "s/WhatToLookFor/WhatToReplaceItWith/", to do these steps:
a) look for a "[" (which must be "escaped" by prefacing it with "\")
b) begin saving (or "tokenizing") what follows, up to the closing "]"
--> in other words it ignores the brackets but stores the number
--> the ".*" that follows the bracket wildcards whatever follows the "]"
c) the stuff between the \(
and the \)
is "tokenized", which means it can be referred-to later, in the "WhatToReplaceItWith" section. The first stuff that's tokenized is referred to via "\1" then second as "\2", etc.
So... we're ignoring the [ and the ] and we're saving the number that lies between the brackets and IGNORING all the wild-carded remainder of each line... thus we're replacing the line with the literal string:
Set /a NumFound=
+ the saved, or "tokenized" number, i.e.
...the first line will read: Set /a NumFound=1
...& the next line reads: Set /a NumFound=2
etc. etc.
Thus, if you have 1,283 email addresses, your results will have 1,283 lines.
The last one executed = the one that matters.
If you use the ">" character to redirect all of the above output to a batch file, i.e.:
> CountChars.bat
...then just call that batch file & you'll have a DOS environment variable named "NumFound" with your answer.