Count specific characters per line using AWK

I just figured out to use the handy little UNIX utility AWK, which makes parsing text files a breeze, if you know how to speak its language. For the uninitated, there is a great list of little AWK one liners that you can check out here:

http://sparky.rice.edu/awk.html

http://awk.info/?awk1line

One thing I couldn’t seem to google was how to extract specific characters on a per-line, per column basis. After some mashing together and trial and error, I came up with a code that will count the number of 1’s and 0’s in a column seperated file (in this case, from column 3 and 4 respectively from the file). Give it a shot, and feel free to use as you see fit ;)

https://gist.github.com/3520003

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Extract Sequences from FASTA file.