How to count string occurrence in string?

How can I count the number of times a particular string occurs in another string. For example, this is what I am trying to do in Javascript:
var temp = “This is a string.”;
alert(temp.count(“is”)); //should output ‘2’

Solutions/Answers:

Solution 1:

The g in the regular expression (short for global) says to search the whole string rather than just find the first occurrence. This matches is twice:

var temp = "This is a string.";
var count = (temp.match(/is/g) || []).length;
console.log(count);

And, if there are no matches, it returns 0:

var temp = "Hello World!";
var count = (temp.match(/is/g) || []).length;
console.log(count);

Solution 2:

/** Function that count occurrences of a substring in a string;
 * @param {String} string               The string
 * @param {String} subString            The sub string to search for
 * @param {Boolean} [allowOverlapping]  Optional. (Default:false)
 *
 * @author Vitim.us https://gist.github.com/victornpb/7736865
 * @see Unit Test https://jsfiddle.net/Victornpb/5axuh96u/
 * @see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4009756/how-to-count-string-occurrence-in-string/7924240#7924240
 */
function occurrences(string, subString, allowOverlapping) {

    string += "";
    subString += "";
    if (subString.length <= 0) return (string.length + 1);

    var n = 0,
        pos = 0,
        step = allowOverlapping ? 1 : subString.length;

    while (true) {
        pos = string.indexOf(subString, pos);
        if (pos >= 0) {
            ++n;
            pos += step;
        } else break;
    }
    return n;
}

Usage

occurrences("foofoofoo", "bar"); //0

occurrences("foofoofoo", "foo"); //3

occurrences("foofoofoo", "foofoo"); //1

allowOverlapping

occurrences("foofoofoo", "foofoo", true); //2

Matches:

  foofoofoo
1 `----´
2    `----´

Unit Test

https://jsfiddle.net/Victornpb/5axuh96u/

Benchmark

I’ve made a benchmark test and my function is more then 10 times
faster then the regexp match function posted by gumbo. In my test
string is 25 chars length. with 2 occurences of the character ‘o’. I
executed 1 000 000 times in Safari.

Safari 5.1

Benchmark> Total time execution: 5617 ms (regexp)

Benchmark> Total time execution: 881 ms (my function 6.4x faster)

Firefox 4

Benchmark> Total time execution: 8547 ms (Rexexp)

Benchmark> Total time execution: 634 ms (my function 13.5x faster)

Edit: changes I’ve made

cached substring length

added type-casting to string.

added optional ‘allowOverlapping’ parameter

fixed correct output for “” empty substring case.

Gist

https://gist.github.com/victornpb/7736865

Solution 3:

function countInstances(string, word) {
   return string.split(word).length - 1;
}

Solution 4:

You can try this:

var theString = "This is a string.";
console.log(theString.split("is").length - 1);

Solution 5:

My solution:

var temp = "This is a string.";

function countOcurrences(str, value) {
  var regExp = new RegExp(value, "gi");
  return (str.match(regExp) || []).length;
}

console.log(countOcurrences(temp, 'is'));

Solution 6:

You can use match to define such function:

String.prototype.count = function(search) {
    var m = this.match(new RegExp(search.toString().replace(/(?=[.\\+*?[^\]$(){}\|])/g, "\\"), "g"));
    return m ? m.length:0;
}