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Reverse a string in JavaScript without using an array

A simple way of reversing a string is as below:
const test = 'hello';
let i = 0;
let j = test.length - 1;
while (i < j) {
let temp = test[i];
test[j] = test[i];
test[i] = temp;
i++;
j--;
}
console.log(test);
If we try to access string using an index it works fine. For example console.log(test[2]) returns 'l'
But reversing a string using the method above returns unchanged string 'hello'. We need to use an array, reverse it and then join it to return the reversed string. But in that case we will be using an extra space. Can we do it without using an extra space?

Strings are immutable in JavaScript. Therefore, they cannot be changed in-place. Any new string requires a new memory allocation, even when doing something as simple as
const str1 = "hello";
const str2 = str[0];
Leaves two strings in memory: "hello" and "h".
Since any attempt to produce a string will create at least one new string, it is therefore impossible to reverse a string without allocating space for a new string where the characters are reversed.
The minimum space complexity for this task is thusO(n) - scales linearly with the string length. Creating an array which can be rearranged in-place and then combined back to the reversed string fulfils this.

Here is a recursive way of doing it:
const rev = s => s.length>1 ? s.at(-1)+rev(s.slice(0,-1)) : s;
console.log(rev("This is a test string."))

The final line of your question means that the answer is "no". We cannot do this without using extra space [in userland JS].
We could, however, do this if we relied on a function written in a systems programming language. And this is the C code used by V8 for Array#join. In such a language the binary representation of the reversed string could be constructed step by step and simply cast to be a UTF-16 string in the final step. I presume this approximates what Array#join does under the hood.
If your requirement is simply to avoid using an array, the following simply successively pulls the code units from the end of the input string and builds a new string from them.
This will fail horribly with surrogate pairs (eg emoji) and grapheme clusters.
const reverse = (s) => {
let result = ''
for(let x = s.length-1; x >= 0; x--) {
result += s[x]
}
return result
}
console.log(reverse('hello'))

What about a hacky for loop?
const rev = (str) => {
for(var i = str.length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
str += str[i];
}
return str.slice(str.length / 2, str.length);
}
console.log(rev("t"));
console.log(rev("te"));
console.log(rev("tes"));
console.log(rev("test"));

OP
"Can we do it without using an extra space."
nope.
Anyhow ... the OP's while based approached which this time does not try to change characters in place but programmatically a) removes character by character from the input value while b) concatenating the reversed result string ...
function reverseStringWithoutHelpOfArray(value) {
value = String(value); // let i = 0;
let result = ''; // let j = test.length - 1;
// while (i < j) {
while (value) { // let temp = test[i];
result = result + value.slice(-1); // test[j] = test[i];
value = value.substring(0, value.length - 1); // test[i] = temp;
} // i++; j--;
return result; // }
}
console.log(
reverseStringWithoutHelpOfArray('hallo')
);

Move string capital letters to front while maintaining the order (JavaScript)

This is my first post so I hope im doing this correctly.
I am taking a coding class and we were asked to make a piece of code that will ask for the input of a phrase, and will return in the console that phrase with the capital letters moved to the front, but still in the same order. Then print to the console this reordered phrase. (We aren't allowed to use arrays)
For example:
Inputting "HeLLoTherE" would return "HLLTEeoher"
However the problem is im having issues understanding how to write this code. How can I make the code select these capital letters and move them to the front? using .toUpperCase()? How can i make that select the letter and move it in front of the rest?
If someone could show me an example of how this is done and explain it a little i would greatly appreciate it :)

You might just start with a the most straight forward algorithm to get something working.
let value = "HeLLoTherE";
let result = "";
for (let char of value) {
if (char >= "A" && char <= "Z") {
result += char;
}
}
for (let char of value) {
if (char >= "a" && char <= "z") {
result += char;
}
}
console.log(result);
You could then consolidate the 2 loops by combining the conditions.
let value = "HeLLoTherE";
let upper = "";
let lower = "";
for (let char of value) {
if (char >= "A" && char <= "Z") {
upper += char;
} else if (char >= "a" && char <= "z") {
lower += char;
}
}
console.log(upper + lower);
Another way of solving this would be to use regex.
var value = "HeLLoTherE";
var upper = value.replace(/[^A-Z]*/g, "");
var lower = value.replace(/[^a-z]*/g, "");
console.log(upper + lower);

Well, you are not able to use arrays, which makes it a little bit difficult, however you can still do sommething.
Although I'm using a for loop, I'm not actually using arrays. Since strings allows the [] operator, you can use an index to select each character of the string and check if it's lowercase or uppercase.
In addition, you said you need to mantain the order of uppercase letters, so you couldn't just do newStr = upper + newStr, because it would revert the original order. So, I used the string.prototype.substring() to insert the uppercase character where it should be.
const str = "HeLLoTherE";
const moveUpperToFront = (target) => {
// Strings are immutable in js, so you cannot move one character
// to the front without using a new string.
let newStr = "";
// Number of uppercase letters that appeared.
// It's necessary because you need to mantain the original order
let upperNumber = 0;
// Iterate each character from beginning
for (let i = 0; i < str.length; ++i) {
// Is there an uppercase letter?
if (str[i].charCodeAt() >= 65 && str[i].charCodeAt() <= 90) {
newStr =
newStr.substring(0, upperNumber) +
str[i] +
newStr.substring(upperNumber, newStr.length);
++upperNumber;
}
// No uppercase letter?
else
newStr += str[i];
}
return newStr;
};
console.log(moveUpperToFront(str));

Following a solution which uses a for...of loop to iterate the input. It splits the input into capital and lowercase literals and then merges back together:
const exampleLiteral = 'HeLLoTherE';
const isUppercase = (literal) => literal === literal.toUpperCase() && literal !== literal.toLowerCase();
const prefixCapitalLetters = (literal) => {
let capitalLetters = '';
let lowerLetters = '';
for (let letter of literal) {
if(isUppercase(letter)) {
capitalLetters = capitalLetters.concat(letter);
continue;
}
lowerLetters = lowerLetters.concat(letter);
};
return capitalLetters+lowerLetters;
}
console.log(prefixCapitalLetters(exampleLiteral));

This is really not a very hard problem:
function rearrange(str) {
let result = "";
for (let c of str)
if (c >= 'A' && c <= 'Z')
result += c;
for (let c of str)
if (c < 'A' || c > 'Z')
result += c;
return result;
}
console.log(rearrange("Hello World, It Is A Beautiful Morning!"));
Find the upper-case characters, and add them to a result string. Then go back and find the other characters, and add them at the end. By looping through without any sorting, just simple iteration from start to finish, the order is preserved (other than the upper-case stuff).
The truly hard part of this would be coming up with a way to detect "upper-case" letters across all of Unicode. Some languages (well, orthographies) don't have the concept at all. JavaScript has ways that are more and less convenient to deal with that, but I suspect for the classroom material the OP has available so far, given the nature of the original question, such regex trickery would probably be inappropriate for an answer.

This answer tries to achieve the desired objective without using "arrays". It does use back-ticks, but that can be replaced with a simple string-concatenation if required.
Code Snippet
// move upper-case letters while
// keeping relative order same
const capsWithOrder = str => {
// initialize result variables
let capsOnly = "", restAll = "";
// iterate over the given string input
for (let i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
// if character at index "i" is upper-case
// then, concatenate character to "capsOnly"
// else, concatenate to "restAll"
if (str[i] === str[i].toUpperCase()) capsOnly += str[i];
else restAll += str[i];
};
// after iterating over all characters in string-input
// return capsOnly concatenated with restAll
return `${capsOnly}${restAll}`;
};
console.log(capsWithOrder("HeLLoTherE"));
Explanation
Inline comments added in the snippet above.

Something like this
const string1 = 'HeLLoTherE'
const transform = string => {
const lower = string.split('').filter(c => c.charCodeAt() > 'a'.charCodeAt())
const upper = string.split('').filter(c => c.charCodeAt() < 'Z'.charCodeAt())
return [...upper, ...lower].join('')
}
console.log(transform(string1))

I think that must be work.
const sort = [
'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'.split(''),
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'.split('')
]
function listByValue(string) {
string = [...string];
let ret = [];
for (let i in sort)
ret = [...ret,...string.filter(e=>sort[i].includes(e))];
return ret.join('')
}

JavaScript remove adjacent duplicate letters [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Remove consecutive duplicate characters in a string javascript
(5 answers)
Closed 1 year ago.
I have seen a few examples of this, but they're either not in JS or are terribly inefficient (like the solution I have now). Basically what I want done is a function that takes in a string and removes any characters that are adjacent and the same. As an example, "jjjavvvaaassscript" would become "javascript". What I'm not looking for is where it would become "javscript" (eliminating the second "a"). I do have a working function shown below, but it's absolutely horrendous and I'm looking for a better way to do it.
function removeChar(text, index) {
return(text.slice(0,index)+text.slice(index+1));
}
function removeDuplicates(text) {
var prevChar = "";
var finalT = text;
var i = 0;
for(i = 0; i < text.length; i++) {
if(finalT.charAt(i) == prevChar) {
if(i > finalT.length) {
return finalT;
} else {
finalT = removeChar(finalT, i);
i--;
}
} else {
prevChar = finalT.charAt(i);
}
}
return finalT;
}
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I'd use a regular expression to match a character, then backreference it as many times as possible (so, for example, it'll match jjj, or a, or vvv, etc), and then replace with the one character:
const removeDuplicates = str => str.replace(/(.)\1*/g, '$1');
console.log(removeDuplicates('jjjavvvaaassscript'));
If you had to iterate more manually, similar to your current method, then:
const removeDuplicates = str => {
let lastChar = str[0];
let finalT = str[0];
for (const char of str.slice(1)) {
if (lastChar !== char) finalT += char;
lastChar = char;
}
return finalT;
};
console.log(removeDuplicates('jjjavvvaaassscript'));

Is it a bad idea to count specific letters in string using regex?

I'm looking for letters (a to m) in the string using regex. I already found a way to do the same thing without regex, but is it possible to do this with regex and is it a good or bad idea to use regex when counting specific letters in the string?
When using regex findError.length value is wrong for me, the other way is working fine
This is how I search for letters using regex
function printerError(s) {
let findError = s.match(/[a-mA-M]+/g).toString();
let sum = (s.length - findError.length);
return sum + '/' + s.length;
}
console.log(printerError("anananaanaann"));
**
Working code
function printerError2(s) {
const goodLetters = Array.from("abcdefghijklm");
let total = s.length;
let badLetters = 0;
for (let i = 0; i < total; i++) {
if ( !goodLetters.includes(s.charAt(i)) ) {
badLetters++;
}
}
return `${badLetters}/${total}`;
}
console.log(printerError2("anananaanaann"));

This returns you the number of chars between a-mA-M in your string:
function printerError(s) {
return s.length - s.replace(/[a-mA-M]/g, '').length;
}
console.log(printerError("anananaanaann"));
Or you can even do:
function printerError(s) {
return (s.match(/[a-mA-M]/g) || []).length;
}
console.log(printerError("anananaanaann"));

Count the number of occurrences of a character in a string in Javascript

I need to count the number of occurrences of a character in a string.
For example, suppose my string contains:
var mainStr = "str1,str2,str3,str4";
I want to find the count of comma , character, which is 3. And the count of individual strings after the split along comma, which is 4.
I also need to validate that each of the strings i.e str1 or str2 or str3 or str4 should not exceed, say, 15 characters.

I have updated this answer. I like the idea of using a match better, but it is slower:
console.log(("str1,str2,str3,str4".match(/,/g) || []).length); //logs 3
console.log(("str1,str2,str3,str4".match(new RegExp("str", "g")) || []).length); //logs 4
Use a regular expression literal if you know what you are searching for beforehand, if not you can use the RegExp constructor, and pass in the g flag as an argument.
match returns null with no results thus the || []
The original answer I made in 2009 is below. It creates an array unnecessarily, but using a split is faster (as of September 2014). I'm ambivalent, if I really needed the speed there would be no question that I would use a split, but I would prefer to use match.
Old answer (from 2009):
If you're looking for the commas:
(mainStr.split(",").length - 1) //3
If you're looking for the str
(mainStr.split("str").length - 1) //4
Both in #Lo's answer and in my own silly performance test split comes ahead in speed, at least in Chrome, but again creating the extra array just doesn't seem sane.

There are at least five ways. The best option, which should also be the fastest (owing to the native RegEx engine) is placed at the top.
Method 1
("this is foo bar".match(/o/g)||[]).length;
// returns 2
Method 2
"this is foo bar".split("o").length - 1;
// returns 2
Split not recommended as it is resource hungry. It allocates new instances of 'Array' for each match. Don't try it for a >100MB file via FileReader. You can observe the exact resource usage using Chrome's profiler option.
Method 3
var stringsearch = "o"
,str = "this is foo bar";
for(var count=-1,index=-2; index != -1; count++,index=str.indexOf(stringsearch,index+1) );
// returns 2
Method 4
Searching for a single character
var stringsearch = "o"
,str = "this is foo bar";
for(var i=count=0; i<str.length; count+=+(stringsearch===str[i++]));
// returns 2
Method 5
Element mapping and filtering. This is not recommended due to its overall resource preallocation rather than using Pythonian 'generators':
var str = "this is foo bar"
str.split('').map( function(e,i){ if(e === 'o') return i;} )
.filter(Boolean)
//>[9, 10]
[9, 10].length
// returns 2
Share:
I made this gist, with currently 8 methods of character-counting, so we can directly pool and share our ideas - just for fun, and perhaps some interesting benchmarks :)

Add this function to sting prototype :
String.prototype.count=function(c) {
var result = 0, i = 0;
for(i;i<this.length;i++)if(this[i]==c)result++;
return result;
};
usage:
console.log("strings".count("s")); //2

Simply, use the split to find out the number of occurrences of a character in a string.
mainStr.split(',').length // gives 4 which is the number of strings after splitting using delimiter comma
mainStr.split(',').length - 1 // gives 3 which is the count of comma

A quick Google search got this (from http://www.codecodex.com/wiki/index.php?title=Count_the_number_of_occurrences_of_a_specific_character_in_a_string#JavaScript)
String.prototype.count=function(s1) {
return (this.length - this.replace(new RegExp(s1,"g"), '').length) / s1.length;
}
Use it like this:
test = 'one,two,three,four'
commas = test.count(',') // returns 3

You can also rest your string and work with it like an array of elements using
Array.prototype.filter()
const mainStr = 'str1,str2,str3,str4';
const commas = [...mainStr].filter(l => l === ',').length;
console.log(commas);
Or
Array.prototype.reduce()
const mainStr = 'str1,str2,str3,str4';
const commas = [...mainStr].reduce((a, c) => c === ',' ? ++a : a, 0);
console.log(commas);

UPDATE: This might be simple, but it is not the fastest. See benchmarks below.
It's amazing that in 13 years, this answer hasn't shown up. Intuitively, it seems like it should be fastest:
const s = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.";
const oCount = s.length - s.replaceAll('o', '').length;
If there are only two kinds of character in the string, then this is faster still:
const s = "001101001";
const oneCount = s.replaceAll('0', '').length;
BENCHMARKS
const { performance } = require('node:perf_hooks');
const ITERATIONS = 10000000;
const TEST_STRING = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.";
console.log(ITERATIONS, "iterations");
let sum = 0; // make sure compiler doesn't optimize code out
let start = performance.now();
for (let i = 0; i < ITERATIONS; ++i) {
sum += TEST_STRING.length - TEST_STRING.replaceAll('o', '').length;
}
let end = performance.now();
console.log(" replaceAll duration", end - start, `(sum ${sum})`);
sum = 0;
start = performance.now();
for (let i = 0; i < ITERATIONS; ++i) {
sum += TEST_STRING.split('o').length - 1
}
end = performance.now();
console.log(" split duration", end - start, `(sum ${sum})`);
10000 iterations
replaceAll duration 2.6167500019073486 (sum 40000)
split duration 2.0777920186519623 (sum 40000)
100000 iterations
replaceAll duration 17.563208997249603 (sum 400000)
split duration 8.087624996900558 (sum 400000)
1000000 iterations
replaceAll duration 128.71587499976158 (sum 4000000)
split duration 64.15841698646545 (sum 4000000)
10000000 iterations
replaceAll duration 1223.3415840268135 (sum 40000000)
split duration 629.1629169881344 (sum 40000000)

Here is a similar solution, but it uses Array.prototype.reduce
function countCharacters(char, string) {
return string.split('').reduce((acc, ch) => ch === char ? acc + 1: acc, 0)
}
As was mentioned, String.prototype.split works much faster than String.prototype.replace.

If you are using lodash, the _.countBy method will do this:
_.countBy("abcda")['a'] //2
This method also work with array:
_.countBy(['ab', 'cd', 'ab'])['ab'] //2

ok, an other one with regexp - probably not fast, but short and better readable then others, in my case just '_' to count
key.replace(/[^_]/g,'').length
just remove everything that does not look like your char
but it does not look nice with a string as input

I have found that the best approach to search for a character in a very large string (that is 1 000 000 characters long, for example) is to use the replace() method.
window.count_replace = function (str, schar) {
return str.length - str.replace(RegExp(schar), '').length;
};
You can see yet another JSPerf suite to test this method along with other methods of finding a character in a string.

Performance of Split vs RegExp
var i = 0;
var split_start = new Date().getTime();
while (i < 30000) {
"1234,453,123,324".split(",").length -1;
i++;
}
var split_end = new Date().getTime();
var split_time = split_end - split_start;
i= 0;
var reg_start = new Date().getTime();
while (i < 30000) {
("1234,453,123,324".match(/,/g) || []).length;
i++;
}
var reg_end = new Date().getTime();
var reg_time = reg_end - reg_start;
alert ('Split Execution time: ' + split_time + "\n" + 'RegExp Execution time: ' + reg_time + "\n");

I made a slight improvement on the accepted answer, it allows to check with case-sensitive/case-insensitive matching, and is a method attached to the string object:
String.prototype.count = function(lit, cis) {
var m = this.toString().match(new RegExp(lit, ((cis) ? "gi" : "g")));
return (m != null) ? m.length : 0;
}
lit is the string to search for ( such as 'ex' ), and cis is case-insensitivity, defaulted to false, it will allow for choice of case insensitive matches.
To search the string 'I love StackOverflow.com' for the lower-case letter 'o', you would use:
var amount_of_os = 'I love StackOverflow.com'.count('o');
amount_of_os would be equal to 2.
If we were to search the same string again using case-insensitive matching, you would use:
var amount_of_os = 'I love StackOverflow.com'.count('o', true);
This time, amount_of_os would be equal to 3, since the capital O from the string gets included in the search.

Easiest way i found out...
Example-
str = 'mississippi';
function find_occurences(str, char_to_count){
return str.split(char_to_count).length - 1;
}
find_occurences(str, 'i') //outputs 4

Here is my solution. Lots of solution already posted before me. But I love to share my view here.
const mainStr = 'str1,str2,str3,str4';
const commaAndStringCounter = (str) => {
const commas = [...str].filter(letter => letter === ',').length;
const numOfStr = str.split(',').length;
return `Commas: ${commas}, String: ${numOfStr}`;
}
// Run the code
console.log(commaAndStringCounter(mainStr)); // Output: Commas: 3, String: 4
Here you find my REPL

I just did a very quick and dirty test on repl.it using Node v7.4. For a single character, the standard for loop is quickest:
Some code:
// winner!
function charCount1(s, c) {
let count = 0;
c = c.charAt(0); // we save some time here
for(let i = 0; i < s.length; ++i) {
if(c === s.charAt(i)) {
++count;
}
}
return count;
}
function charCount2(s, c) {
return (s.match(new RegExp(c[0], 'g')) || []).length;
}
function charCount3(s, c) {
let count = 0;
for(ch of s) {
if(c === ch) {
++count;
}
}
return count;
}
function perfIt() {
const s = 'Hello, World!';
const c = 'o';
console.time('charCount1');
for(let i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
charCount1(s, c);
}
console.timeEnd('charCount1');
console.time('charCount2');
for(let i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
charCount2(s, c);
}
console.timeEnd('charCount2');
console.time('charCount3');
for(let i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
charCount2(s, c);
}
console.timeEnd('charCount3');
}
Results from a few runs:
perfIt()
charCount1: 3.301ms
charCount2: 11.652ms
charCount3: 174.043ms
undefined
perfIt()
charCount1: 2.110ms
charCount2: 11.931ms
charCount3: 177.743ms
undefined
perfIt()
charCount1: 2.074ms
charCount2: 11.738ms
charCount3: 152.611ms
undefined
perfIt()
charCount1: 2.076ms
charCount2: 11.685ms
charCount3: 154.757ms
undefined
Update 2021-Feb-10: Fixed typo in repl.it demo
Update 2020-Oct-24: Still the case with Node.js 12 (play with it yourself here)

UPDATE 06/10/2022
So I ran various perf tests and if your use case allows it, it seems that using split is going to perform the best overall.
function countChar(char: string, string: string): number {
return string.split(char).length - 1
}
countChar('x', 'foo x bar x baz x')
I know I am late to the party here but I was rather baffled no one answered this with the most basic of approaches. A large portion of the answers provided by the community for this question are iteration based but all are moving over strings on a per-character basis which is not really efficient.
When dealing with a large string that contains thousands of characters walking over each character to get the occurance count can become rather extraneous not to mention a code-smell. The below solutions take advantage of slice, indexOf and the trusted traditional while loop. These approaches prevent us having to walk over each character and will greatly speed up the time it takes to count occurances. These follow similar logic to that you'd find in parsers and lexical analyzers that require string walks.
Using with Slice
In this approach we are leveraging slice and with every indexOf match we will move our way through the string and eliminate the previous searched potions. Each time we call indexOf the size of the string it searches will be smaller.
function countChar (char: string, search: string): number {
let num: number = 0;
let str: string = search;
let pos: number = str.indexOf(char);
while(pos > -1) {
str = str.slice(pos + 1);
pos = str.indexOf(char);
num++;
}
return num;
}
// Call the function
countChar('x', 'foo x bar x baz x') // 3
Using with IndexOf from position
Similar to the first approach using slice but instead of augmenting the string we are searching it will leverage the from parameter in indexOf method.
function countChar (char: string, str: string): number {
let num: number = 0;
let pos: number = str.indexOf(char);
while(pos > -1) {
pos = str.indexOf(char, pos + 1);
num++;
}
return num;
}
// Call the function
countChar('x', 'foo x bar x baz x') // 3
Personally, I go for the second approach over the first, but both are fine and performant when dealing with large strings but also smaller sized ones too.

s = 'dir/dir/dir/dir/'
for(i=l=0;i<s.length;i++)
if(s[i] == '/')
l++

I was working on a small project that required a sub-string counter. Searching for the wrong phrases provided me with no results, however after writing my own implementation I have stumbled upon this question. Anyway, here is my way, it is probably slower than most here but might be helpful to someone:
function count_letters() {
var counter = 0;
for (var i = 0; i < input.length; i++) {
var index_of_sub = input.indexOf(input_letter, i);
if (index_of_sub > -1) {
counter++;
i = index_of_sub;
}
}
http://jsfiddle.net/5ZzHt/1/
Please let me know if you find this implementation to fail or do not follow some standards! :)
UPDATE
You may want to substitute:
for (var i = 0; i < input.length; i++) {
With:
for (var i = 0, input_length = input.length; i < input_length; i++) {
Interesting read discussing the above:
http://www.erichynds.com/blog/javascript-length-property-is-a-stored-value

What about string.split(desiredCharecter).length-1
Example:
var str = "hellow how is life";
var len = str.split("h").length-1; will give count 2 for character "h" in the above string;

The fastest method seems to be via the index operator:
function charOccurances (str, char)
{
for (var c = 0, i = 0, len = str.length; i < len; ++i)
{
if (str[i] == char)
{
++c;
}
}
return c;
}
console.log( charOccurances('example/path/script.js', '/') ); // 2
Or as a prototype function:
String.prototype.charOccurances = function (char)
{
for (var c = 0, i = 0, len = this.length; i < len; ++i)
{
if (this[i] == char)
{
++c;
}
}
return c;
}
console.log( 'example/path/script.js'.charOccurances('/') ); // 2

function len(text,char){
return text.innerText.split(string).length
}
console.log(len("str1,str2,str3,str4",","))
This is a very short function.

The following uses a regular expression to test the length. testex ensures you don't have 16 or greater consecutive non-comma characters. If it passes the test, then it proceeds to split the string. counting the commas is as simple as counting the tokens minus one.
var mainStr = "str1,str2,str3,str4";
var testregex = /([^,]{16,})/g;
if (testregex.test(mainStr)) {
alert("values must be separated by commas and each may not exceed 15 characters");
} else {
var strs = mainStr.split(',');
alert("mainStr contains " + strs.length + " substrings separated by commas.");
alert("mainStr contains " + (strs.length-1) + " commas.");
}

I'm using Node.js v.6.0.0 and the fastest is the one with index (the 3rd method in Lo Sauer's answer).
The second is:
function count(s, c) {
var n = 0;
for (let x of s) {
if (x == c)
n++;
}
return n;
}

And there is:
function character_count(string, char, ptr = 0, count = 0) {
while (ptr = string.indexOf(char, ptr) + 1) {count ++}
return count
}
Works with integers too!

Here's one just as fast as the split() and the replace methods, which are a tiny bit faster than the regex method (in Chrome and Firefox both).
let num = 0;
let str = "str1,str2,str3,str4";
//Note: Pre-calculating `.length` is an optimization;
//otherwise, it recalculates it every loop iteration.
let len = str.length;
//Note: Don't use a `for (... of ...)` loop, it's slow!
for (let charIndex = 0; charIndex < len; ++charIndex) {
if (str[charIndex] === ',') {
++num;
}
}

var mainStr = "str1,str2,str3,str4";
var splitStr = mainStr.split(",").length - 1; // subtracting 1 is important!
alert(splitStr);
Splitting into an array gives us a number of elements, which will always be 1 more than the number of instances of the character. This may not be the most memory efficient, but if your input is always going to be small, this is a straight-forward and easy to understand way to do it.
If you need to parse very large strings (greater than a few hundred characters), or if this is in a core loop that processes large volumes of data, I would recommend a different strategy.

String.prototype.reduce = Array.prototype.reduce;
String.prototype.count = function(c) {
return this.reduce(((n, x) => n + (x === c ? 1 : 0)), 0)
};
const n = "bugs bunny was here".count("b")
console.log(n)
Similar to the prototype based above, but does not allocate an array for the string. Allocation is the problem of nearly every version above, except the loop variants. This avoids loop code, reusing the browser implemented Array.reduce function.

My solution:
function countOcurrences(str, value){
var regExp = new RegExp(value, "gi");
return str.match(regExp) ? str.match(regExp).length : 0;
}

I know this might be an old question but I have a simple solution for low-level beginners in JavaScript.
As a beginner, I could only understand some of the solutions to this question so I used two nested FOR loops to check each character against every other character in the string, incrementing a count variable for each character found that equals that character.
I created a new blank object where each property key is a character and the value is how many times each character appeared in the string(count).
Example function:-
function countAllCharacters(str) {
var obj = {};
if(str.length!==0){
for(i=0;i<str.length;i++){
var count = 0;
for(j=0;j<str.length;j++){
if(str[i] === str[j]){
count++;
}
}
if(!obj.hasOwnProperty(str[i])){
obj[str[i]] = count;
}
}
}
return obj;
}