Verify the variable has "space" or not?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

How to check if a variable contains space in it??? or any other character??? using if condition..

2

unless its empty it will hopefully contain characters... What do you mean by other?

3 
grep " " -c
4

a="ind ia"
b="india"

here, variabe a contains space, but b dont...
like this, i want to check that the variable contains i or not...

5 
a="ind ia"
b="india"
$ echo $a | grep " " -c
1
$ echo $b | grep " " -c
0
6

Please post what Operating System you have and what Shell you use.

If you are validating a field, it is better to work from a list of valid characters.
What are the valid characters?

If you just want to count the characters, one trick is to delete everything except that character, then count what's left:

# Counting space characters
echo "abc def"|tr -cd " "|wc -c
1
echo "abcdef"|tr -cd " "|wc -c
0
# Counting "a" characters
echo "abc def"|tr -cd "a"|wc -c
1
echo "abcdef"|tr -cd "a"|wc -c
1

@pamu
The grep -c command counts lines not characters.