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

There are at least five ways. The best option, which should also be the fastest (owing to the native RegEx engine) is placed at the top.

Method 1

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

Method 2

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

Split not recommended as it is resource hungry. It allocates new instances of 'Array' for each match. Don't try it for a >100MB file via FileReader. You can observe the exact resource usage using Chrome's profiler option.

Method 3

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

Method 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++]));
     // returns 2

Method 5

Element mapping and filtering. This is 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
    // returns 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 :)

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

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

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

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 performance test split comes ahead in speed, at least in Chrome, but again creating the extra array just doesn't seem sane.