filtering out some strings

[papori]

hi,
i want to filter out lines that contain more than 49% of specific character.
for example:
line 1 : QWERWWWRWT
line 2 : QWERTYUIPPP

After:
line 2 only, because in line 1 i had 5/10 times "W".

is there an easy way by bash? sed or awk?

Thanks!
Pap

[Kloschüssel]

awk can definitely do the job. However, I have neither the time nore the knowledge to give you ready-to-rumble code snippets. Work your ways through awk tutorials on how to count characters with it. Mostly you'll have to count all "W" characters in one variable and the rest in another variable and compare the outcome on a line feed. A good start will be this site.

[watael]

hi,

it's probably easier the other way:

• keep line in a variable
• substitute "W" with nothing in kept line
• get length of line and of modified kept line
• do line's length minus modified line's length and do the percentage
• if it's less than 49, then print line

use awk, because bash can't do float arithmetics.

[Kloschüssel]

gsub should be able to replace every W (gsub("[W]", "")) and every not-W (gsub("[^W]", ""). Comparing the length of both resulting strings should then be enough - no fancy arithmatics needed.

More or less something alike this:

        line_onlychar=gsub("[W]", "");
        line_nochar=gsub("[^W]", "");
        if(length(line_nochar) > length(line_onlychar)) {
                # matched
        }

[watael]

yes, gsub() returns the number of substitutions

awk '{
   keep=$0
   Ws=gsub("W","",keep)
   if(length(keep)<Ws)print
}'

«49» makes me think that it may be any "ratio", not only 50-50.

[papori]

yes, gsub() returns the number of substitutions

awk '{
   keep=$0
   Ws=gsub("W","",keep)
   if(length(keep)<Ws)print
}'

«49» makes me think that it may be any "ratio", not only 50-50.

Thanks watael!
your assuming was right also!

[papori]

yes, gsub() returns the number of substitutions

awk '{
   keep=$0
   Ws=gsub("W","",keep)
   if(length(keep)<Ws)print
}'

«49» makes me think that it may be any "ratio", not only 50-50.

what if i want the ratio to be 60-40.
just if there are more than 60% of not W characters keep the line.

Many thanks!

[watael]

replace the if statement with this one

if( (length(keep)/length($0))*100 >= 60 )print

[papori]

replace the if statement with this one

if( (length(keep)/length($0))*100 >= 60 )print

Great!
Thanks for quick respond!