Write the commands to count the number of characters stored in the shell variable text. Then write the commands to count all the alphabetic characters. (Hint: Use sed and wc.) What happens to special character sequences such as \n if they're stored inside text?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

First command:
count=$(echo $text | wc -c)
Technically the wc -c command actually returns a count of all characters plus the end of line character too, so bonus points for an answer that takes that into account like:
count="$(echo $text | wc -c)" ; count=$(( $count - 1 ))
You can also accomplish this with a shell variable trick too: count=${#text}
Second script:
count="$(echo $text | sed 's/[^a-zA-Z]//g' | wc -c)"
With the same caveat about that extra character for the end of line. Special characters like \n are interpreted as a sequence of two individual characters, the \ is removed as not being alphabetical and it's counted as an n, a single character
Also, a more portable way to solve this problem is to use the language-specific character set notation of [:alpha:] instead of an explicit range. This allows languages like Spanish and German to be properly processed and analyzed:
count="$(echo $text | sed 's/[^[:alpha:]]//g' | wc -c)"