Problem with GREP

Hello,

I am having a small problem with using the unix command grep on an XML file.

I need to count the number of occurrences of a certain tag in the XML file.

I'm using this command but the count is 36 and the count should be only 9, any ideas?

without seeing your output this is a stab in the dark, but maybe using the -l flag to wc instead of -w

Ouch!

Ok, the grep will only copy out the lines with the <tag1> in, then you are counting all words in all those lines.

You could use grep -c "<tag1>" but that would only count the number of lines with that tag so if you had the tag twice on a line it'd only be counted once.

Theres a bash script i found someone wrote that might do the trick. http://www.unix.com/linux/45575-find-multiple-strings-count-file.html

First, I think you need to escape the "<" and ">" or surround the tag in single quotes.

Second, since grep does counts of lines, just using grep isn't going to give you a count of the number of times this tag exists in your file unless you know it can only occur at most once on each line. I would suggest:

1.Shell script where you go through each line and do:
$count = 0;
while($line != EOF)
{
$count+=awk -F\<tag\> print {NF};
}

2.Or, in perl you can use regex with the g option and store that into an array, then store that into a scalar which gives you the number of occurences per line to add onto your $count.
source: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=410702