title: Recursively loop through an array and return number of items?
body: <p>I apologize if this has been asked before but I could not find an answer. How do I loop through an array with nested arrays and in the console print out the number of instances an item appears? </p>
  
  <p>So <code>console.log</code> should print out the number 2 for the name "bob" because "bob" appears twice in the array.</p>
  
  <p>Here is my array and what I have so far:</p>
  
  <p><div class="snippet" data-lang="js" data-hide="false">
  <div class="snippet-code">
  <pre class="snippet-code-js lang-js prettyprint-override"><code>    var names = ["bob", ["steve", "michael", "bob", "chris"]];
  
      function loop(arr, item) {
        for (var i = 0; i &lt; arr.length; i++) {
          if (arr[i] instanceof Array) {
            loop(arr[i], item);
          } else {
            if (arr[i] == item) {
              console.log(arr[i]);
            }
          }
        }
      }
  
      loop(names, "bob");</code></pre>
  </div>
  </div>
  </p>