Text Processing with JavaScript

Recipe 20

Counting the Number of a Specific Word with split()

Task

Suppose you want to add search functionality to your application that provides information on how many times a word has appeared in a text. You can use the includes() method to determine whether the word exists within the string. But it doesn’t tell you the frequency of the word’s appearance.

You want to create a function that counts the number of a specified word (in this case, “cougar”) and returns the total number it finds.

Solution

Divide the string into an array of substrings with the split() method, count the number of items in the array by reading its length property, and return the result:

part_1/counting_a_specific_word/split_ex1.js

const str = `Cougar is an adaptable, ...