[SOLVED] Adding a character in each line depending upon number of such characters present in a line.
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Actually, you don't really need regular expressions for this stuff. What you do need is to count the occurances of the dots in each line. That can be done (as you've already seen above) in a lot of different ways.
But yes, you are right. Regular expressions are awesome, but I'm not very good at 'em myself. As every other thing it takes time to get the hang of. Time that I don't really have at the moment.
I just want to point out that the Awk one-liners posted by the other dudes (or dudettes, what do I know!?!) are probably more efficient than my attempt at a solution. But, Awk is another one of those things I haven't found time to properly learn, it looks like hieroglyphs to me, and I only use the '{ print }' function! Another thing on my to-do list...
Time to learn more about regular expressions, I guess.
Only Firerat's solution uses a regular expression.
Mine is a bit sneaky; It uses a different field separator and checks how many fields there are (2 fields -> add leading dot).
As already mentioned by HMW: Regular expressions are very powerful and can be used almost anywhere. If you want to know more about them then have a look here: Regular-Expressions.info
Here are some awk related links that might come in handy:
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