CountChars

Return how many times needle is contained in haystack. number = _CountChars(haystack, needle)

Arguments

 * haystack: String - The search subject.
 * needle: The string to look for. needle can be a regular expression ('[a-z%s%d]' will count all alphanumeric characters and white spaces)


 * Notes
 * Arguments are cast into strings before any processing is done.
 * The search is not case-sensitive.

Returns

 * number: Number of times needle is contained in haystack. If needle is not found, returns 0.

Example
number1 = &lt;PREFIX&gt;_CountChars("World of Warcraft", 'o') number2 = &lt;PREFIX&gt;_CountChars("World of Warcraft", 'w[a-z]') number3 = &lt;PREFIX&gt;_CountChars("World of Warcraft", 'r[a-z]') number4 = &lt;PREFIX&gt;_CountChars("World of Warcraft", 'r[a-z][a-z]')

Result
number1 = 2 number2 = 2 number3 = 3 number4 = 3

Code
function _CountChars (haystack, needle) haystack = strlower(tostring(haystack)); needle = strlower(tostring(needle)); local ret, pos = 0, 0 for i = 1, strlen(haystack) do       local s, e = strfind(haystack, needle, pos) if e then pos = e           if s == e then pos = pos + 1 end end if s and e then ret = ret + 1; else break -- If it hasn't found any more, there's no reason to continue end end return ret end