countof

The countof function counts occurrences of a substring in a string. Plain string matches may overlap; regex matches don’t.

Syntax

​

    countof( Source, Search [, Kind] )

Arguments

​

• Source: A string.
• Search: The plain string or regular expression to match inside source.
• Kind: normal or regex, defaults to normal.

Results

​

The number of times that the search string can be matched in the container. Plain string matches may overlap; regex matches don’t.

Examples

​

This example returns 3:

print countof("Hello, world!", "l")

This example returns 1:

print countof("Hello, world!", "ll")

The next few examples show the different treatment of overlapping substrings in normal versus regex searches.

This example returns 3:

print countof("aaa", "a")

This example returns 3 (not 2!) because it matches all overlapping occurrences:

print countof("aaaa", "aa")

This example returns 2:

print countof("ababa", "ab", "normal")

This example returns 2:

print countof("ababa", "aba")

This example returns 1, because the regex argument prevents matches on overlapping occurrences:

print countof("ababa", "aba", "regex")

This example returns 2:

print countof("abcabc", "a.c", "regex")

This example returns 6:

print countof("abcdefedcba", "[abc]", "regex")

This example returns 2:

print countof("abc1234abcd1234", "[0-9]+", "regex")