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

Question

I need to count the number of occurrences of a character in a string.

For example, suppose my string contains:

var mainStr = \"str1,str2,str3,str4\";         


        

Answer 1

I have found that the best approach to search for a character in a very large string (that is 1 000 000 characters long, for example) is to use the replace() method.

window.count_replace = function (str, schar) {
    return str.length - str.replace(RegExp(schar), '').length;
};

You can see yet another JSPerf suite to test this method along with other methods of finding a character in a string.