How to count the number of occurrences of a character in an Oracle varchar value?

Question

How can I count number of occurrences of the character - in a varchar2 string?

Example:

select XXX(\'123-345-566\', \'-\') from dual;
--         


        

Answer 1

here is a solution that will function for both characters and substrings:

select (length('a') - nvl(length(replace('a','b')),0)) / length('b')
  from dual

where a is the string in which you search the occurrence of b

have a nice day!

Answer 2

Here's an idea: try replacing everything that is not a dash char with empty string. Then count how many dashes remained.

select length(regexp_replace('123-345-566', '[^-]', '')) from dual

Answer 3

REGEXP_COUNT should do the trick:

select REGEXP_COUNT('123-345-566', '-') from dual;