Count occurrences of a substring
![Task](http://static.miraheze.org/rosettacodewiki/thumb/b/ba/Rcode-button-task-crushed.png/64px-Rcode-button-task-crushed.png)
You are encouraged to solve this task according to the task description, using any language you may know.
The task is to either create a function, or show a built-in function, to count the number of non-overlapping occurrences of a substring inside a string. The function should take two arguments: the first argument being the string to search and the second a substring to be search for. It should return an integer count.
<lang pseudocode>print countSubstring("the three truths","th") 3
// do not count substrings that overlap with previously-counted substrings: print countSubstring("ababababab","abab") 2</lang>
ALGOL 68
Algol68 has no build in function to do this task, hence the next to create a count string in string routine. <lang algol68>#!/usr/local/bin/a68g --script #
PROC count string in string = (STRING needle, haystack)INT: (
INT start:=LWB haystack, next, out:=0; FOR count WHILE string in string(needle, next, haystack[start:]) DO start+:=next+UPB needle-LWB needle; out:=count OD; out
);
printf(($d" "$,
count string in string("th", "the three truths"), # expect 3 # count string in string("abab", "ababababab"), # expect 2 # count string in string("a*b", "abaabba*bbaba*bbab"), # expect 2 # $l$
))</lang> Output:
3 2 2
Java
This method replaces the first occurence of the substring, checks for changes, and continues if something changed. It counts each replacement attempt (even if nothing is replaced), so the count starts at -1 to offset the last replacement where nothing changed. <lang java>import java.util.regex.Pattern;
public class CountSubstring { public static int countSubstring(String subStr, String str){ int ans = -1;//start at -1 since we always count at least 1 replacement String newStr = str; do{ str = newStr; newStr = str.replaceFirst(Pattern.quote(subStr), "");//attempt a replacement ans++;//count it }while(!str.equals(newStr)); return ans; }
public static void main(String[] args){ System.out.println(countSubstring("th", "the three truths")); System.out.println(countSubstring("abab", "ababababab")); System.out.println(countSubstring("a*b", "abaabba*bbaba*bbab")); } }</lang> Output:
3 2 2
Perl
<lang perl>sub countSubstring {
my $str = shift; my $sub = quotemeta(shift); my $count = () = $str =~ /$sub/g; return $count;
- or return scalar( () = $str =~ /$sub/g );
}
print countSubstring("the three truths","th"), "\n"; print countSubstring("ababababab","abab"), "\n";</lang>
Perl 6
<lang perl6>sub count-substring($big,$little) { +$big.comb: /$little/ }
say count-substring("the three truths","th"); say count-substring("ababababab","abab");</lang> Note that in Perl 6 the /$little/ matches the variable literally, so there's no need to quote regex metacharacters. Also, prefix + forces numeric context in Perl 6 (it's a no-op in Perl 5). One other style point: we now tend to prefer hyphenated names over camelCase.
PureBasic
<lang PureBasic>a = CountString("the three truths","th") b = CountString("ababababab","abab")
- a = 3
- b = 2</lang>
Python
<lang python>>>> "the three truths".count("th") 3 >>> "ababababab".count("abab") 2</lang>
Tcl
The regular expression engine is ideal for this task, especially as the ***= prefix makes it interpret the rest of the argument as a literal string to match: <lang tcl>proc countSubstrings {haystack needle} {
regexp -all ***=$needle $haystack
} puts [countSubstrings "the three truths" "th"] puts [countSubstrings "ababababab" "abab"] puts [countSubstrings "abaabba*bbaba*bbab" "a*b"]</lang>
Output:
3 2 2