Literally: length( gregexpr(";", b)[[1]])
But more generally, in case b has more than one element: sapply(gregexpr(";", b), length) ?gregexpr On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 3:18 PM, Santosh Srinivas < santosh.srini...@gmail.com> wrote: > New to R ... which is a function to most effectively search the number of > occurrences of a character in a string? > > b <- > c("jkhrikujhj345hi5hiklfjsdkljfksdio324j';;'lfd;g'lkfit34'5;435l;43'5k") > > I want the number of semi-colons ";" in b? > > Thanks. > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > -- Michael Sumner Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania Hobart, Australia e-mail: mdsum...@gmail.com [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.