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    +1 should be more efficient than the tr&wc version. Commented Aug 14, 2011 at 19:41
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    Yes, but can it handle Unicode? Commented Aug 15, 2011 at 10:51
  • @amphetamachine, yes - at least a quick test with ß (utf hex: c3 9f) (instead of ") works as expected, i.e. tr, sed and awk do complement/replacement/counting without a problem - on a Ubuntu 10.04 system. Commented Aug 15, 2011 at 18:29
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    Most versions of tr, including GNU tr and classic Unix tr, operate on single byte characters and are not Unicode compliant.. Quoted from Wikipedia tr (Unix) .. Try this snippet: echo "aā⧾c" | tr "ā⧾" b ... on Ubuntu 10.04 ... ß is a single byte Extended Latin char and is handled by tr... The real issue here is not that tr doesn't handle Unicode (because ALL characters are Unicode), it is really that tr only handles one-byte at a time.. Commented Aug 15, 2011 at 19:32
  • @fred, no, ß is not a single byte character - its Unicode position is U+00DF, which is coded as 'c3 9f' in UTF-8, i.e. two bytes. Commented Aug 16, 2011 at 7:20