How can I find the EXACT amount of matching words in a string?

for a project I’ve written a function which includes the following:

var filtering_words = ['alpha', 'beta', 'gamma'];

//finding matching words
var prohibited_words = filtering_words;
for (var i = 0; i < prohibited_words.length; i++) {
  if (value.indexOf(prohibited_words[i]) > -1) {
    user_report['matching_words'].push(prohibited_words[i]);
    user_report['matching_words_amount'] = user_report['matching_words'].length;
  } 
}

String: ‘alpha beta beta gamma’

For now I just get all the matching words. So my result would look like that: [‘alpha’], [‘beta’], [‘gamma’]

But I would also like to know how often a “filtering_word” is in my string. In this case I would want to know that there are actually 2 betas…

Any idea?

Cheers

Answer

Store the results in an Object instead of an Array, so that you could map the filtered word to the number of occurrences.

To find the number of occurrences, use a RegExp with the g flag to get an array of all occurrences (and i flag for a case insensitive search), then get the resulting array length.

var user_report = { matching_words: {} }
var value = 'lambdabetaalphabeta'
var filtering_words = ['alpha', 'beta', 'gamma'];

var prohibited_words = filtering_words;
for (var i = 0; i < prohibited_words.length; i++) {
   var matches = (value.match(new RegExp(prohibited_words[i], 'ig')) || []).length
   if (matches) {
     var matching_words = user_report['matching_words'] || {};
     matching_words[prohibited_words[i]] = matches
   }
}
user_report['matching_words_amount'] = Object.keys(user_report['matching_words']).length

console.log(user_report)