Get number of commas in a line using Vimscript

Question

This question may have an obvious answer that I'm missing, but how can I easily tell how many of a character, in this case " , " are in a line, or a specified string using vimscript?

Answer 1

VimScript does not have a special character type. In fact, you always count() for substrings (or items in list):

:echo count(getline("."), ",")

Answer 2

You can use this:

:echo len(split(getline('.'), ','))

That will get the content of the current line, split it on the , (comma) to a list and count the number of items of the list.

Note: that the count() function just relatively recently learned about counting items in strings, while this solution is also compatible with Vim 7.