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Comments on Count the number of occurrences in a text string
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Count the number of occurrences in a text string
If I have some text in a cell, how can I find the number of times another piece of text appears in it?
For example, suppose A1 contains Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.. pick occurs 2 times in this string. What formula can I put in A2 so that it counts the occurrences of pick and returns 2?
Post
@elgonzo mentioned correctly that the nice trick from @pnuts can not be applied if you are interested in the number of occurrences including overlapping ones.
So, just in case someone is in need of such a functionality, here is a function in LibreOffice Basic which handles that case:
Function countOccurrences(searchedWithin As String, searchedFor As String) As Long
Dim count As Long
Dim foundPos As Long
count = -1 ' Will become 0 on loop entry and then 1 if really found the first time
foundPos = 0 ' Will cause search to start at 1 in first loop iteration
Do
count = count + 1
foundPos = Instr(foundPos + 1, searchedWithin, searchedFor, 0)
Loop While foundPos > 0
countOccurrences = count
End Function
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