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

Another option is stringi

library(stringi)
stri_count(str1,fixed=',')
#[1] 2
stri_count(str1,fixed='ion')
#[1] 1

Benchmarks

vec <- paste(sample(letters, 1e6, replace=T), collapse=' ')
f1 <- function() str_count(vec, 'a')
f2 <- function() stri_count(vec, fixed='a')
f3 <- function() length(gregexpr('a', vec)[[1]])

library(microbenchmark)
microbenchmark(f1(), f2(), f3(), unit='relative', times=20L)
#Unit: relative
#expr      min       lq     mean   median       uq      max neval cld
# f1() 18.41423 18.43579 18.37623 18.36428 18.46115 17.79397    20   b
# f2()  1.00000  1.00000  1.00000  1.00000  1.00000  1.00000    20  a 
# f3() 18.35381 18.42019 18.30015 18.35580 18.20973 18.21109    20   b