I have used:
tr -dc [:alpha:] < $fileDoc | wc -c
to count all letters,
tr -dc ' ' < $fileDoc | wc -c
to count all spaces,
tr -dc '\n' < $fileDoc | wc -c
to count all new lines in a text document.
What I would like to do now is to do now is count all other characters in the document as I will call every thing else.
Here is the text from the document:
Hello this is a test text document.
123
!@#
Is there a way to delete everything [:alpha:], , and \n found and count the remaining characters?
This should do the trick
tr -d '[:alpha:] \n' < $fileDoc | wc -c
Or perhaps if you want to include tabs in the definition of blanks
tr -d '[:alpha:][:space:]' < $fileDoc | wc -c
Based on the OP's comment, to delete alphabetical, spaces, digits, and newlines and count all remaining characters:
tr -d '[:alnum:][:space:]' < $fileDoc | wc -c
[:alnum:] accounts for letters of the alphabet and digits. [:space:] takes care of all whitespace including newlines