Count the number of occurrences of a character in a string in Javascript

Question

I need to count the number of occurrences of a character in a string.

For example, suppose my string contains:

var mainStr = \"str1,str2,str3,str4\";         


        

Answer 1

There are at least four ways. The best option, which should also be the fastest -owing to the native RegEx engine -, is placed at the top. jsperf.com is currently down, otherwise I would provide you with performance statistics.

Update: Please, find the performance tests here, and run them yourselves, so as to contribute your performance results. The specifics of the results will be given later.

1.

 ("this is foo bar".match(/o/g)||[]).length
 //>2

2.

"this is foo bar".split("o").length-1
 //>2

split not recommended. Resource hungry. Allocates new instances of 'Array' for each match. Don't try that for a >100MB file via FileReader. You can actually easily observe the EXACT resource usage using Chrome's profiler option.

3.

var stringsearch = "o"
   ,str = "this is foo bar";
for(var count=-1,index=-2; index != -1; count++,index=str.indexOf(stringsearch,index+1) );
 //>count:2

4.

searching for a single character

var stringsearch = "o"
   ,str = "this is foo bar";
for(var i=count=0; i<str.length; count+=+(stringsearch===str[i++]));
 //>count:2

Update:

5.

element mapping and filtering, not recommended due to its overall resource preallocation rather than using Pythonian 'generators'

var str = "this is foo bar"
str.split('').map( function(e,i){ if(e === 'o') return i;} )
             .filter(Boolean)
//>[9, 10]
[9, 10].length
//>2

Share: I made this gist, with currently 8 methods of character-counting, so we can directly pool and share our ideas - just for fun, and perhaps some interesting benchmarks :)

https://gist.github.com/2757250

Answer 2

Simply, use the split to find out the number of occurrences of a character in a string.

mainStr.split(',').length // gives 4 which is the number of strings after splitting using delimiter comma

mainStr.split(',').length - 1 // gives 3 which is the count of comma

Answer 3

Here is my solution. Lots of solution already posted before me. But I love to share my view here.

const mainStr = 'str1,str2,str3,str4';

const commaAndStringCounter = (str) => {
  const commas = [...str].filter(letter => letter === ',').length;
  const numOfStr = str.split(',').length;

  return `Commas: ${commas}, String: ${numOfStr}`;
}

// Run the code
console.log(commaAndStringCounter(mainStr)); // Output: Commas: 3, String: 4

Here you find my REPL

Answer 4

Here is a similar solution, but it uses Array.prototype.reduce

function countCharacters(char, string) {
  return string.split('').reduce((acc, ch) => ch === char ? acc + 1: acc, 0)
}

As was mentioned, String.prototype.split works much faster than String.prototype.replace.

Answer 5

Add this function to sting prototype :

String.prototype.count=function(c) { 
  var result = 0, i = 0;
  for(i;i<this.length;i++)if(this[i]==c)result++;
  return result;
};

usage:

console.log("strings".count("s")); //2

Answer 6

I just did a very quick and dirty test on repl.it using Node v7.4. For a single character, the standard for loop is quickest:

Some code:

// winner!
function charCount1(s, c) {
    let count = 0;
    c = c.charAt(0); // we save some time here
    for(let i = 0; i < s.length; ++i) {
        if(c === s.charAt(i)) {
            ++count;
        }
    }
    return count;
}

function charCount2(s, c) {
    return (s.match(new RegExp(c[0], 'g')) || []).length;
}

function charCount3(s, c) {
    let count = 0;
    for(ch of s) {
        if(c === ch) {
            ++count;
        }
    }
    return count;
}

function perfIt() {
    const s = 'Hello, World!';
    const c = 'o';

    console.time('charCount1');
    for(let i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
        charCount1(s, c);
    }
    console.timeEnd('charCount1');
    
    console.time('charCount2');
    for(let i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
        charCount2(s, c);
    }
    console.timeEnd('charCount2');
    
    console.time('charCount3');
    for(let i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
        charCount2(s, c);
    }
    console.timeEnd('charCount3');
}

Results from a few runs:

 perfIt()
charCount1: 3.843ms
charCount2: 11.614ms
charCount3: 11.470ms
=> undefined
   perfIt()
charCount1: 3.006ms
charCount2: 8.193ms
charCount3: 7.941ms
=> undefined
   perfIt()
charCount1: 2.539ms
charCount2: 7.496ms
charCount3: 7.601ms
=> undefined
   perfIt()
charCount1: 2.654ms
charCount2: 7.540ms
charCount3: 7.424ms
=> undefined
   perfIt()
charCount1: 2.950ms
charCount2: 9.445ms
charCount3: 8.589ms

Update 2020-Oct-24: Still the case with Node.js 12 (play with it yourself here)