Count specific characters in a cell

  • Thread starter Thread starter JGreg7
  • Start date Start date
J

JGreg7

Is there a way to count the number of times a specific character occurs in a
specific cell?

For example, if cell A1 has "ABC123ABC" and I wanted to count the number of
occurances that "A" showed up, and wanted the out put to be in B1. In this
example the desired result would equal "2".
 
It can be done by splitting the data into separate columns and then using a
countif formula but that may not be feasable in the s/s. If you have a whole
column of similar data then it's simple to use the Text to Columns feature.
More info would help.

I hope someone can come up with a way because that would be helpful to me
also.
 
Try this...

=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"A",""))

Note that this is case sensitive.

If A1 = aBC123ABC the formula will return 1. Only the upper case "A" is
being counted. Likewise, if the formula was:

=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"a",""))

Then in this case only the lower case "a" will be counted.

If you want to ignore case then try this version:

=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(UPPER(A1),UPPER("A"),""))

That will count both lower and upper case "a" or "A".
 
=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"A",""))

or, for a non-case-sensitive version:
=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(UPPER(A1),"A",""))
 
The text strings I have to deal with are actually fairly long. I have been
converting them to text and importing them into Excel as delimited files
using the desired character as the delimiter. I then have to sort and tag
the data and then reassenmble the text strings. Although this works, it is
very tedious. There must be a better way.
 
Luke has the answer. Thanks Luke.

JGreg7 said:
The text strings I have to deal with are actually fairly long. I have been
converting them to text and importing them into Excel as delimited files
using the desired character as the delimiter. I then have to sort and tag
the data and then reassenmble the text strings. Although this works, it is
very tedious. There must be a better way.
Click to expand...
 
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