How to find the number of occurrences of a string in file using windows command line?

Question

I have a huge files with e-mail addresses and I would like to count how many of them are in this file. How can I do that using Windows' command line ?

I have tried this but it just prints the matching lines. (btw : all e-mails are contained in one line)

findstr /c:"@" mail.txt

Answer 1

Using what you have, you could pipe the results through a find. I've seen something like this used from time to time.

findstr /c:"@" mail.txt | find /c /v "GarbageStringDefNotInYourResults"

So you are counting the lines resulting from your findstr command that do not have the garbage string in it. Kind of a hack, but it could work for you. Alternatively, just use the find /c on the string you do care about being there. Lastly, you mentioned one address per line, so in this case the above works, but multiple addresses per line and this breaks.

Answer 2

Why not simply using this (this determines the number of lines containing (at least) an @ char.):

find /C "@" "mail.txt"

Example output:

---------- MAIL.TXT: 96

---

To avoid the file name in the output, change it to this:

find /C "@" < "mail.txt"

Example output:

96

---

To capture the resulting number and store it in a variable, use this (change %N to %%N in a batch file):

set "NUM=0"
for /F %N in ('find /C "@" ^< "mail.txt"') do set "NUM=%N"
echo %NUM%