[javascript] Count number of matches of a regex in Javascript

I wanted to write a regex to count the number of spaces/tabs/newline in a chunk of text. So I naively wrote the following:-

numSpaces : function(text) { 
    return text.match(/\s/).length; 
}

For some unknown reasons it always returns 1. What is the problem with the above statement? I have since solved the problem with the following:-

numSpaces : function(text) { 
    return (text.split(/\s/).length -1); 
}

This is certainly something that has a lot of traps. I was working with Paolo Bergantino's answer, and realising that even that has some limitations. I found working with string representations of dates a good place to quickly find some of the main problems. Start with an input string like this: '12-2-2019 5:1:48.670'

and set up Paolo's function like this:

function count(re, str) {
    if (typeof re !== "string") {
        return 0;
    }
    re = (re === '.') ? ('\\' + re) : re;
    var cre = new RegExp(re, 'g');
    return ((str || '').match(cre) || []).length;
}

I wanted the regular expression to be passed in, so that the function is more reusable, secondly, I wanted the parameter to be a string, so that the client doesn't have to make the regex, but simply match on the string, like a standard string utility class method.

Now, here you can see that I'm dealing with issues with the input. With the following:

if (typeof re !== "string") {
    return 0;
}

I am ensuring that the input isn't anything like the literal 0, false, undefined, or null, none of which are strings. Since these literals are not in the input string, there should be no matches, but it should match '0', which is a string.

With the following:

re = (re === '.') ? ('\\' + re) : re;

I am dealing with the fact that the RegExp constructor will (I think, wrongly) interpret the string '.' as the all character matcher \.\

Finally, because I am using the RegExp constructor, I need to give it the global 'g' flag so that it counts all matches, not just the first one, similar to the suggestions in other posts.

I realise that this is an extremely late answer, but it might be helpful to someone stumbling along here. BTW here's the TypeScript version:

function count(re: string, str: string): number {
    if (typeof re !== 'string') {
        return 0;
    }
    re = (re === '.') ? ('\\' + re) : re;
    const cre = new RegExp(re, 'g');    
    return ((str || '').match(cre) || []).length;
}

(('a a a').match(/b/g) || []).length; // 0
(('a a a').match(/a/g) || []).length; // 3

Based on https://stackoverflow.com/a/48195124/16777 but fixed to actually work in zero-results case.

('my string'.match(/\s/g) || []).length;

As mentioned in my earlier answer, you can use RegExp.exec() to iterate over all matches and count each occurrence; the advantage is limited to memory only, because on the whole it's about 20% slower than using String.match().

var re = /\s/g,
count = 0;

while (re.exec(text) !== null) {
    ++count;
}

return count;

how about like this

function isint(str){
    if(str.match(/\d/g).length==str.length){
        return true;
    }
    else {
         return false
    }
}