Count Occurrences of a Given Character using Regex in Java

Given a string and a character, the task is to make a function that counts the occurrence of the given character in the string using Regex.

Examples:

Input: str = "geeksforgeeks", c = 'e'
Output: 4
'e' appears four times in str.

Input: str = "abccdefgaa", c = 'a' 
Output: 3
'a' appears three times in str.

Regular Expressions 

Regular Expressions or Regex is an API for defining String patterns that can be used for searching, manipulating, and editing a string in Java. Email validation and passwords are a few areas of strings where Regex is widely used to define the constraints. Regular Expressions are provided under java.util.regex package. 

Approach - Using Matcher.find() method in Java Regex

• Get the String in which it is to be matched
• Find all occurrences of the given character using Matcher.find() function (in Java)
• For each found occurrence, increment the counter by 1

Below is the implementation of the above approach:

// Java program to count occurrences
// of a character using Regex

import java.util.regex.*;

class GFG {

    // Method that returns the count of the given
    // character in the string
    public static long count(String s, char ch)
    {

        // Use Matcher class of java.util.regex
        // to match the character
        Matcher matcher
            = Pattern.compile(String.valueOf(ch))
                  .matcher(s);

        int res = 0;

        // for every presence of character ch
        // increment the counter res by 1
        while (matcher.find()) {
            res++;
        }

        return res;
    }

    // Driver method
    public static void main(String args[])
    {
        String str = "geeksforgeeks";
        char c = 'e';
        System.out.println("The occurrence of " + c + " in "
                           + str + " is " + count(str, c));
    }
}

The occurrence of e in geeksforgeeks is 4

Related Article: 

• Program to count the occurrence of a given character in a string
• Count occurrence of a given character in a string using Stream API in Java