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Count Occurrence of a Character in a String

Sun, 03/20/2011 - 9:39pm — Lepa
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I had the need to count an occurrence of a specific character in a string and after tossing some ideas back and forth between a couple of my colleges, we came up with the below two SQLs. You pass a string and identify the character you are looking to count its occurrence. In both SQLs below, I'm trying to count how many times does ">>" exists in string "This is>>a string>>to look into>>". The answer of course is 3 times.

SQL Option 1:

SELECT COUNT (*)
 FROM (SELECT SUBSTR ('This is>>a string>>to look into>>', ROWNUM, 2 ) s,
              ROWNUM pos
         FROM all_tab_columns
        WHERE ROWNUM <=
                   LENGTH ('This is>>a string>>to look into>>')) a
WHERE s = '>>';

SQL Option 2:

SELECT (LENGTH (line) - LENGTH (TRANSLATE (line, 'x>>', 'x'))) / 2 nbvowels
 FROM (SELECT 'This is>>a string>>to look into>>' line
         FROM DUAL);

I personally prefer option 2. Do you have a better way of achieving the same result? Please share it in the comments section below if you do!

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