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I have a text file containing tweets and I'm required to count the number of times a word is mentioned in the tweet. For example, the file contains:

Apple iPhone X is going to worth a fortune
The iPhone X is Apple's latest flagship iPhone. How will it pit against it's competitors?

And let's say I want to count how many times the word iPhone is mentioned in the file. So here's what I've tried.

cut -f 1 Tweet_Data | grep -i "iPhone" | wc -l

it certainly works but I'm confused about the 'wc' command in unix. What is the difference if I try something like:

cut -f 1 Tweet_Data | grep -c "iPhone"

where -c is used instead? Both of these yield different results in a large file full of tweets and I'm confused on how it works. Which method is the correct way of counting the occurrence?

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2 Answers 2

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Given such a requirement, I would use a GNU grep (for the -o option), then pass it through wc to count the total number of occurrences:

$ grep -o -i iphone Tweet_Data | wc -l
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Plain grep -c on the data will count the number of lines that match, not the total number of words that match. Using the -o option tells grep to output each match on its own line, no matter how many times the match was found in the original line.

wc -l tells the wc utility to count the number of lines. After grep puts each match in its own line, this is the total number of occurrences of the word in the input.


If GNU grep is not available (or desired), you could transform the input with tr so that each word is on its own line, then use grep -c to count:

$ tr '[:space:]' '[\n*]' < Tweet_Data | grep -i -c iphone
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  • -o option is also available in MacOS/BSD grep
    – wisbucky
    Dec 9, 2021 at 0:58
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Easiest Method is,

grep -wc "your_text" FileName

for you it wil be,

grep -wc "iPhone" Tweet_Data
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  • 2
    Very clean answer however if you are matching a word like 'cool' you will only match cool and NOT ccooll so be aware that spaces around the word matter. Aug 21, 2019 at 15:51
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    The result will be incorrect when the word occurs more than once in a line.
    – hek2mgl
    Aug 27, 2019 at 16:52

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