On Thu, 16 Dec 1999 22:59:46, David Cassell <cassell@mail.cor.epa.gov> wrote:

> > > How many lines of SAS code would you need to write a program > > > to read through a file and count the number of commas which > > > were not preceded by a backslash or immediately followed > > > by another comma?

> BTW, my Perl solution was a one-liner on the command line, > perl -0777ne 'print tr/,/,/' your.filename.here > That's all it takes.

But that program doesn't seem to fulfill _all_ of the specifications. How does it _not_ count "backslash/comma" pairs, and _not_ count "double-comma" pairs?