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up vote 4 down vote favorite
1

Is there a command either standalone or in vi or similar (can be gui) that will show me the numeric sequence of a string?

Input: The cat hopped in a box.

Output: 

T h e   c a t   h o  p  p  e  d     i  n     a     b  o  x  .
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
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Not the exact output that you want but you can run strings into od -c to show numbered output. –  slm♦ Oct 30 '14 at 13:30

4 Answers 4

up vote 8 down vote accepted

Here's a hybrid perl/fold approach:

$ echo "The cat hopped in a box." | fold -w 1 | 
     perl -lne 'push @k, "$_ "; push @l,sprintf "%-2s",$.; END{print "@k\n@l"}'
T  h  e     c  a  t     h  o  p  p  e  d     i  n     a     b  o  x  . 
1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Explanation

  • fold -w 1: this will fold the input at a width of one character, resulting in each input character printed on a separate line.
  • perl -lne : the -l removes trailing newlines from the input and adds a newline to each print call; the n reads input line by line and the e provides the script to run on it.
  • push @k, " $_"; : Add a space to the the current line ($_) and save it in in the array @k.
  • push @l,sprintf "%-2s",$.; : sprintf will return a formatted string, here we are giving it the current line number ($.) and telling it to print it with spaces added as needed to make its length 2. The string is then added to the @l array.
  • END{print "@k\n@l"}' : once the whole file has been read, print the two arrays.

If you just need to number the characters and don't mind multi-line output, a simpler approach is (using a shorter string for brevity):

$ echo "foo bar" | fold -w1 | cat -n
 1  f
 2  o
 3  o
 4   
 5  b
 6  a
 7  r
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I think the second approach is much better - once the input string goes over about 30 characters and starts to wrap, the one-per-line output ensures you still have the numbers and the letters aligned. The perl example would need some more work to interlace properly. –  Floris Oct 30 '14 at 17:36
up vote 2 down vote

You can use perl:

$ echo The cat hopped in a box. | perl -nle '
    printf "%-3s", $_ for split //;
    printf "\n";
    printf "%-3s", $_ for 1..length'
T  h  e     c  a  t     h  o  p  p  e  d     i  n     a     b  o  x  .  
1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
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up vote 7 down vote

It's very simple to use the shell and basic tools:

$ echo "The cat hopped in a box." |
    (read a ; echo $a | sed 's/./&  /g' ; seq -ws" " 01 ${#a})
 T  h  e     c  a  t     h  o  p  p  e  d     i  n     a     b  o  x  .  
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Explanation

The string is read into the $a variable. The ( ) will run the commands inside them in a subshell, needed to make the $a variable accessible. It is then passed to sed which replaces each character with itself followed by two spaces. Finally, the seq command prints a 0-padded list of numbers from 01 to the length of the $a string.

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You don't need the subshell; the command work if you replace ( ) with { ;}. –  G-Man Oct 30 '14 at 17:38
up vote 6 down vote

zsh:

$ text='The cat hopped in a box.'
$ chars=(${(s::)text})
$ print -aC$#chars $chars {1..$#chars}
T   h   e       c   a   t       h   o   p   p   e   d       i   n       a       b   o   x   .
1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24
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