JavaScript: How many times a character occurs in a string?

Question

Is there a simple way to check how many times a character appears in a String?

Answer 1

You could remove any other character in the string and check the length:

str.replace(/[^a]/g, "").length 

Here it is counted how many as are in str. The RegExp is described below:

[ // Start Character Group ^ // Not operator in character group a // The character "a" ] // End character group 

Answer 2

This counts a in below example:

str = "A man is as good as his word"; alert(str.split('a').length-1); 

If you want case insensitive you'd want something like

alert(str.split( new RegExp( "a", "gi" ) ).length-1); 

So that it grabs "A" and "a" ... "g" flag isn't really needed, but you do need the "i" flag