Number of times a particular character appears in a string

Question

Is there MS SQL Server function that counts the number of times a particular character appears in a string?

Answer 1

You can do it inline, but you have to be careful with spaces in the column data. Better to use datalength()

SELECT 
  ColName, 
  DATALENGTH(ColName) -
  DATALENGTH(REPLACE(Col, 'A', '')) AS NumberOfLetterA
FROM ColName;

-OR- Do the replace with 2 characters

SELECT 
  ColName, 
  -LEN(ColName)
  +LEN(REPLACE(Col, 'A', '><')) AS NumberOfLetterA
FROM ColName;