How do you count the number of occurrences of a certain substring in a SQL varchar?

I have a column that has values formatted like a,b,c,d. Is there a way to count the number of commas in that value in T-SQL?

Solution 1:

The first way that comes to mind is to do it indirectly by replacing the comma with an empty string and comparing the lengths

Declare @string varchar(1000)
Set @string = 'a,b,c,d'
select len(@string) - len(replace(@string, ',', ''))

Solution 2:

Quick extension of cmsjr's answer that works for strings with more than one character.

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.CountOccurrencesOfString
(
    @searchString nvarchar(max),
    @searchTerm nvarchar(max)
)
RETURNS INT
AS
BEGIN
    return (LEN(@searchString)-LEN(REPLACE(@searchString,@searchTerm,'')))/LEN(@searchTerm)
END

Usage:

SELECT * FROM MyTable
where dbo.CountOccurrencesOfString(MyColumn, 'MyString') = 1