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

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.

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 :)