R count number of commas and string

Question

I have a string:

    str1 <- \"This is a string, that I\'ve written 
        to ask about a question, or at least tried to.\"

How would

Answer 1

This really is an adaptation of Richie Cotton's answer. I hate having to repeat the same function over and over. This approach allows you to feed a vector of terms to match within the string:

str1 <- "This is a string, that I've written to ask about a question, 
    or at least tried to."
matches <- c(",", "ion") 
sapply(matches,  function(x) length(gregexpr(x, str1, fixed = TRUE)[[1]]))
#  , ion 
#  2   1