How do I find lines in a file without exactly 35 occurrences of a character?

Question

How could I use sed to find all lines that don't have exactly 35 occurrences of the "|" character?

If I can't use sed , what could I use?

Answer 1

I'd use awk as it's more readable and doesn't involve nasty regular expression syntax:

awk -F'|' 'NF != 36' filename

Or grep :

grep -v '^\([^|]*|\)\{35\}[^|]*$' filename

But if you want to use sed :

sed '/^\([^|]*|\)\{35\}[^|]*$/d' filename

Answer 2

Here's something you could try:

perl -ne 'print unless (split(/|/, $_)==36);' your_input_file

Splits each line at | and counts the number of resulting parts. If there are 36, you've got 35 | and the line is not printed. Otherwise, the line is printed.