[R] Counting the occurences of a charater within a string

[Douglas Esneault]

I am new to R but am experienced SAS user and I was hoping to get some help on counting the occurrences of a character within a string at a row level.

My dataframe, x,  is structured as below:

Col1
abc/def
ghi/jkl/mno

I found this code on the board but it counts all occurrences of "/" in the dataframe.  

chr.pos <- which(unlist(strsplit(x,NULL))=='/')
chr.count <- length(chr.pos)
chr.count
[1] 3

I'd like to append a column, say cnt, that has the count of "/" for each row.

Can anyone point me in the right direction or offer some code to do this?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Doug Esneault






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