Checking how many letters are in a string.

I need to count how many Hebrew characters a given string has. I have been checking, character by character, if the given character is a [א-ת] and if so I simply ++ the counting variable. It turns out that this is rather resouce intensive, and I may need a better way of doing this. I have looked at count_chars and considered writing a wrapper function for each of the 27 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, but I am quite sure that there is a cleverer method. Any ideas? Dotan Cohen http://what-is-what.com http://gibberish.co.il א-ב-ג-ד-ה-ו-ז-ח-ט-י-ך-כ-ל-ם-מ-ן-נ-ס-ע-ף-פ-ץ-צ-ק-ר-ש-ת A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?