Search string for exact word, return number of matches

Question

Hello I was wondering if anybody could help, i'm trying to search a string for a word and console log the amount of times that word appears in the string, however I only want it to return the count of whole words it finds, so at the moment the example below will return '3' because it will find 'car' twice but also the word 'care' which contains the word 'car' within it, is there anyway I can amend the code so it only finds the whole word and not words it's inside?

Many thanks.

<div class="sentence">I have a car and I need to take good care of this car</div>

let find = 'car';

let count = $('.sentence').text().split(find).length - 1;

console.log(count);

Does this answer your question? [How to find index of all occurrences of element in array?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20798477/how-to-find-index-of-all-occurrences-of-element-in-array) — developer, May 06 '20 at 14:55
What about put a space in front and the end of your find variable. Let's say instead of `let find = 'car'; to be `let find = ' car '; — gie3d, May 06 '20 at 14:59

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 06 '20 at 14:53

You can use regex and use test to match the exact string. $('.sentence').text().split(' ') will split the string and will create an array , then use reduce to get the count. Inside reduce callback use test to match exact word and if matches then increase the count

let find = 'car';
let count = $('.sentence').text().split(' ').reduce((acc, curr) => {
  if (/^car$/.test(curr)) {
    acc += 1;
  }
  return acc;
}, 0)
console.log(count);

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<div class="sentence">I have a car and I need to take good care of this car</div>

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 06 '20 at 14:53

0

Absolutely there is a way, use match:

let count = $('.sentence').text().match(/\bcar\b/g).length;

By using the word boundary (\b) the return is 2. Without using it (i.e. /car/) the return would be 3 because of the word care in that string.

answered May 06 '20 at 14:53

Josh Davenport-Smith

5,456
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It throws an Error if there are no matches – Mark Partola May 06 '20 at 14:59
No matches return `null`. It would error if calling `match` on a non-string but that is well out of the scope of this question imo – Josh Davenport-Smith May 06 '20 at 15:06
Try this `"".match(/a/g)` – Mark Partola May 06 '20 at 15:09

Mark Partola · Answer 3 · 2020-05-06T15:01:30.050

0

You can use match here to find all of the substrings.

const matches = line.match(/\bcar\b/g)

It returns null if there are no matches or array with them

So, to count them:

const count = matches ? matches.length : 0

edited May 06 '20 at 15:01

answered May 06 '20 at 14:55

Mark Partola

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered May 06 '20 at 14:56

What you can do is split the word based on the space delimiter, which will return an array of words. You can then loop on this array and look for an exact match of your word:

const str = 'I have a car and I need to take good care of this car';
const words = str.split(' ');
words.forEach(function(word){
    if (word==="car"){
        console.log("found car")
    }
})

Edit: Please note that if your sentence contains commas or other punctuation marks, you will need to split on those marks too.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered May 06 '20 at 15:02

0

let string = $('.sentence').text();

Now match the string which you are looking for. To find the exact match you can write like below

let count =  string.match(/\bcar\b/g);
count = count? count.length : 0;  
console.log(count);

answered May 06 '20 at 15:02

S. Rasel

2,841
1
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Search string for exact word, return number of matches

5 Answers5