Basically, I'm writing a shell script in Unix and I need to retrieve a value that says what place a word occurs in a sentence/string and then store that value in a variable.
For example, the word "blue" is the third word in the following sentence "the fast blue car". Therefore, I'd like the value for this word to be 3 and store it in a variable called $blue. I.e. echo $blue would print out the number 3.
All the examples I've found so far print out the position of a word in terms of characters not words.
Maybe something like this?
text="The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
tokens=$(echo $text | sed 's/[.\\\/;,?!:]//g') # Add any missing punctuation marks here
$pos = 0
for token in $tokens
do
pos=$(($pos + 1))
if [[ "$token" == "fox" ]]
then
echo $pos
fi
done
This'll print the position of the word "fox" (4 in this case) out to the command line. Multiple occurrences of the word will yield multiple outputs.
Here's another in awk. Borrowing @SebastianLenartowicz's $text:
$ text="the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" # in lower and no punctuations
$ echo $text | awk -v RS="[ \n]" -v s=fox '$0==s{print NR}'
4
Explained:
-v RS="[ \n]" Record Separator to space or newline-v s=foxsearch word goes to script in variable s$0==s{print NR} if the record ($0) equals s print the row or record number NR
