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

I have updated this answer. I like the idea of using a match better, but it is slower:

console.log(("str1,str2,str3,str4".match(/,/g) || []).length); //logs 3

console.log(("str1,str2,str3,str4".match(new RegExp("str", "g")) || []).length); //logs 4

jsfiddle

Use a regular expression literal if you know what you are searching for beforehand, if not you can use the RegExp constructor, and pass in the g flag as an argument.

match returns null with no results thus the || []

The original answer I made in 2009 is below. It creates an array unnecessarily, but using a split is faster (as of September 2014). I'm ambivalent, if I really needed the speed there would be no question that I would use a split, but I would prefer to use match.

Old answer (from 2009):

If you're looking for the commas:

(mainStr.split(",").length - 1) //3

If you're looking for the str

(mainStr.split("str").length - 1) //4

Both in @Lo's answer and in my own silly jsperf test split comes ahead in speed, at least in Chrome, but again creating the extra array just doesn't seem sane.

Answer 2

The fastest method seems to be via the index operator:

function charOccurances (str, char)
{
  for (var c = 0, i = 0, len = str.length; i < len; ++i)
  {
    if (str[i] == char)
    {
      ++c;
    }
  }
  return c;
}

console.log( charOccurances('example/path/script.js', '/') ); // 2

Or as a prototype function:

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

console.log( 'example/path/script.js'.charOccurances('/') ); // 2

Answer 3

The following uses a regular expression to test the length. testex ensures you don't have 16 or greater consecutive non-comma characters. If it passes the test, then it proceeds to split the string. counting the commas is as simple as counting the tokens minus one.

var mainStr = "str1,str2,str3,str4";
var testregex = /([^,]{16,})/g;
if (testregex.test(mainStr)) {
  alert("values must be separated by commas and each may not exceed 15 characters");
} else {
  var strs = mainStr.split(',');
  alert("mainStr contains " + strs.length + " substrings separated by commas.");
  alert("mainStr contains " + (strs.length-1) + " commas.");
}

Answer 4

A quick Google search got this (from http://www.codecodex.com/wiki/index.php?title=Count_the_number_of_occurrences_of_a_specific_character_in_a_string#JavaScript)

String.prototype.count=function(s1) { 
    return (this.length - this.replace(new RegExp(s1,"g"), '').length) / s1.length;
}

Use it like this:

test = 'one,two,three,four'
commas = test.count(',') // returns 3

Answer 5

I know this might be an old question but I have a simple solution for low-level beginners in JavaScript.

As a beginner, I could only understand some of the solutions to this question so I used two nested FOR loops to check each character against every other character in the string, incrementing a count variable for each character found that equals that character.

I created a new blank object where each property key is a character and the value is how many times each character appeared in the string(count).

Example function:-

function countAllCharacters(str) {
  var obj = {};
  if(str.length!==0){
    for(i=0;i<str.length;i++){
      var count = 0;
      for(j=0;j<str.length;j++){
        if(str[i] === str[j]){
          count++;
        }
      }
      if(!obj.hasOwnProperty(str[i])){
        obj[str[i]] = count;
      }
    }
  }
  return obj;
}

Answer 6

I'm using Node.js v.6.0.0 and the fastest is the one with index (the 3rd method in Lo Sauer's answer).

The second is:

function count(s, c) {
  var n = 0;
  for (let x of s) {
    if (x == c)
      n++;
  }
  return n;
}