Counting specific chars in a string

[Dreamlax]

It looks like there is no function for counting the amount of a certain character(s) in a string (or I am just dumb). Right now I've got this:

Public Function StrCount(String1, String2) As Long
For x = 1 To Len(String1)
 If Mid(String1, x, Len(String2)) = String2 Then StrCount = StrCount + 1
Next x
End Function

But this seems to work too:

Public Function StrCount(String1, String2) As Long
Dim sCount() As String
sCount = Split(String1, String2)
StrCount = UBound(sCount)
End Function

But surely there is a VB function that I missed, or an API. There's a few string API functions, but none of them seem to do anything related to this...

Any Ideas?

[John Yingling]

No, but this will be faster.

Function CountCharacter(byval strText as string, _
        byval strCharsToCount, _
        bval lngCompare) as long
    Dim I              as long
    Dim lngCount as long
    Dim lngInstr   as long
    Dim L              as long
    I = 1
    L = Len(strCharsToCount)
    lf L = 0 then exit function
    Do
       'lngcompare  0 = BinaryCompare, 1=textcompare
        lngInstr = Instr(I,strText, _
                                 strCharsToCount, _
                                 lngCompare)
        If lngInstr = 0 then Exit Do
        lngCount = lngCount + 1
        I = lngInstr + L
    Loop
    CountCharacter = lngCount

[Nucleus]

Private Function InStrCount(Source As String, Search As String) As Long
    InStrCount = Len(Source) - Len(Replace(Source, Search, ""))
End Function

[gaffa]

Or and easy, if not necessarily fast, method:

Count = UBound(Split(TheString, TheChar)) + 1

- gaffa

[Dreamlax]

The fastest seems to be the one which involves splitting and counting the array...

[Nucleus]

Byte arrays are always the fastest appraoch to processing each character in a string.

Test the functions on a string of 500,000 characters to quantify the difference, the results might shock you.

[Dreamlax]

Yeah, the strings I tested were only about 7 or 8 thou, using a 500 thou character string showed that the Byte Array was actually a fair bit faster.

[Dreamlax]

Oh, Nucleus, I just realised that your code doesn't work with Carriage Return Line Feeds (vbCrLf). Doesn't matter though because that's not what I'm after.

[Nucleus]

Yes that is because carriage return is two consecutive characters not one, are you changing the spec on me? Ha!

[Dreamlax]

No no no, but I was wondering why it didn't work when I tried a multibyte constant...

[gaffa]

He, he,

My little one liner will work for strings of any length....

I'm actually pretty surprised that it's reasonably fast, I honestly thought ity would be as slow as a wet week, but there you go.

- gaffa

[Nucleus]

Yes the choice is easy one liner with vb where speed is not a concern using split/replace, but if speed is important then go with byte arrays.

If you want to count multibyte strings and speed is required, just yell.

[Dreamlax]

Speed is an issue, but not with multibyte strings...

[Nucleus]

Ok so i was bored.

I wrote the mutibyte code and compared replace,split and byte arrays.

On my pc byte array solution was 3300% faster than both replace and split.

The project is attached if it interests you

[Dreamlax]

3300% eh? Not bad at all. In fact I'd say that's the best you could get...

[Nucleus]

Yeah, but you have to write so much more code, which potentially introduces more bugs too. So in 99%of the cases I would go with Gaffa's one liner.