counting set words (eg "the") in a visual basic string

Horlock

Is there a way of counting the number of times the word the appears in the sentence out of the frying pan into the fire

I have an input sentence as a string and I just want to count the number of matches, I've tried:



regularexpresions.regex.ismatch(input, "the")

but this only returns true or false



From my reading of the documentation I thought that the following would work

regularexpresions.regex.match(input, "the").Groups.Count

but this doesn't seem to give me anything that resembles what I want



I tried a loop

dim counter as integer = 0
while regularexpresions.regex.ismatch(input, "the") regularexpresions.regex.replace(input, "the", "")
counter = counter+1
end while

but the replaces replaces all matches on the first go so gives me zero for none, but 1 for any other number. So no better than the ismatch above

Help please

Finally I'm not too worried about issues with counts arising from the words there, therefore, other but feel free to include measures of how to deal with these

albertross_2

try using instr, and substr and len in a loop to count

Horlock

You are an absolute gem

Thanks so much!

I think that substr may be a thing of the past - I couldn't get it to work in vb .net 2005 anyway - but that didn't matter because the method worked a treat.

Code below shows my function - probably not very elegant - but it works. Thanks again. I'm really greatful!

---

Private Function countsubstring(ByVal bigstring As String, ByVal substring As String)
Dim counter As Integer = 0
While RegularExpressions.Regex.IsMatch(bigstring, substring)
counter = counter + 1
bigstring = bigstring.Remove(InStr(bigstring, substring) - 1, Len(substring))
' MessageBox.Show(bigstring & InStr(bigstring, substring) & Len(substring))
End While
Return counter
End Function