Count number of matches of a regex in Javascript

I wanted to write a regex to count the number of spaces/tabs/newline in a chunk of text. So I naively wrote the following:-

numSpaces : function(text) { 
    return text.match(/\s/).length; 
}

For some unknown reasons it always returns 1. What is the problem with the above statement? I have since solved the problem with the following:-

numSpaces : function(text) { 
    return (text.split(/\s/).length -1); 
}

Solution 1:

tl;dr: Generic Pattern Counter

// THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED
const count = (str) => {
  const re = /YOUR_PATTERN_HERE/g
  return ((str || '').match(re) || []).length
}

For those that arrived here looking for a generic way to count the number of occurrences of a regex pattern in a string, and don't want it to fail if there are zero occurrences, this code is what you need. Here's a demonstration:

/*
 *  Example
 */

const count = (str) => {
  const re = /[a-z]{3}/g
  return ((str || '').match(re) || []).length
}

const str1 = 'abc, def, ghi'
const str2 = 'ABC, DEF, GHI'

console.log(`'${str1}' has ${count(str1)} occurrences of pattern '/[a-z]{3}/g'`)
console.log(`'${str2}' has ${count(str2)} occurrences of pattern '/[a-z]{3}/g'`)

Original Answer

The problem with your initial code is that you are missing the global identifier:

>>> 'hi there how are you'.match(/\s/g).length;
4

Without the g part of the regex it will only match the first occurrence and stop there.

Also note that your regex will count successive spaces twice:

>>> 'hi  there'.match(/\s/g).length;
2

If that is not desirable, you could do this:

>>> 'hi  there'.match(/\s+/g).length;
1

Solution 2:

As mentioned in my earlier answer, you can use RegExp.exec() to iterate over all matches and count each occurrence; the advantage is limited to memory only, because on the whole it's about 20% slower than using String.match().

var re = /\s/g,
count = 0;

while (re.exec(text) !== null) {
    ++count;
}

return count;

Solution 3:

(('a a a').match(/b/g) || []).length; // 0
(('a a a').match(/a/g) || []).length; // 3

Based on https://stackoverflow.com/a/48195124/16777 but fixed to actually work in zero-results case.