Can it count whole words only?

Yes — enable the whole-word option so substrings inside longer words are not counted.

Does it support regex?

Yes — turn on regex to count matches of a custom pattern instead of a literal string.

Does it count overlapping matches?

No. It uses a global regular-expression scan, which finds non-overlapping matches left to right — the same way most search tools count occurrences.

What is the difference between substring and whole-word counting?

A substring count matches the text anywhere, so "cat" matches inside "category". Whole-word mode wraps the term in word boundaries, so only the standalone word "cat" counts.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. Counting happens entirely in your browser and nothing leaves your device.

What is the Count Occurrences?

Free occurrence counter — count how many times a word, phrase or regular expression appears in your text, with case-insensitive and whole-word options. Runs entirely in your browser, nothing is uploaded. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Count Occurrences — Gera Tools

Name: Count Occurrences
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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This tool counts how many times a word, phrase, or pattern appears in a block of text. It is useful for checking keyword density in an article, auditing how often a term repeats in a document, tallying specific entries in a log, or verifying that a find-and-replace covered every occurrence. The count updates live as you type, with three matching modes: substring, whole-word, and regular expression.

How it works

The tool builds a global regular expression from your search term. For a literal search, any special regex characters in your input are escaped so the term is matched exactly as typed. Switching on regex uses your input as a pattern directly — without escaping. Whole-word mode wraps the term in \b word boundaries, excluding matches that occur inside longer words. Case-insensitive mode adds the i flag. The tool then counts non-overlapping matches left-to-right across your text.

Worked example

In the text “the cat sat on the mat with the hat”:

Search	Mode	Count	Why
`the`	substring	3	Matches “the” in three positions
`at`	substring	4	Matches inside “cat”, “sat”, “mat”, “hat”
`at`	whole word	0	”at” never appears as a standalone word
`the`	whole word	3	”the” is always a standalone word here
`[cm]at`	regex	2	Matches “cat” and “mat”

Using regex for power counting

The regex mode opens up patterns that literal search cannot handle:

Count sentences ending with a question mark: \? (or \?\s for more precision).
Count any word starting with a capital letter: \b[A-Z][a-z]+.
Count lines that start with a number: ^\d (with the m multiline flag built in).
Count email addresses: \b[\w.-]+@[\w.-]+\.\w{2,}\b.

If your regex is invalid, the tool catches the error and shows a message rather than crashing.

Common uses

Keyword density check: paste an article and count how many times your target keyword appears before publishing.
Log triage: paste a server log and count occurrences of ERROR or a specific status code.
Writing audit: check how often you have used a word like “very” or “thing” before editing.
Find-and-replace verification: after a global replace, confirm zero occurrences of the old term remain.

Everything runs in your browser — nothing you paste is uploaded.