I was able to solve this by passing a string through scan as shown in another answer.
For example:
string = 'This is an example'
puts string.count('e')
Outputs:
2
I was also able to pull the occurrences by using scan and passing a sting through instead of regex which varies slightly from another answer but was helpful in order to avoid regex.
string = 'This is an example'
puts string.scan('e')
Outputs:
['e','e']
I explored these methods further in a guide I created after I figured it out.