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How to count # of occurrences of a character inside a string in Flow?

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Hi everyone,

I am trying to make a fun what-personality-are-you-quiz by using Forms, SharePoint and Flow and I've run into a problem.

Each question in Forms has four options and every option is equivalent to a letter value in a SharePoint List (e.g. "a", "b", "c" or "d") and after using an ODATA filter to get the right letters depending on answers from Forms and a Compose i get a string with the values:

a, a, b, a, c, a, c, d,

And noooooow, I would like be able to count how many occurances "a", "b", "c" and "d" has, to then check which letter has the most occurances. I am looking for a function like CountIf or something similar but can't find it in Flow?

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Building flows

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abm abm 32,858 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Re: How to count # of occurrences of a character inside a string in Flow?

Hi @Anonymous

There is no such count function in Flow expressions. You could try using the split expression and find the count using the length.

See below expression.

length(split(variables('Text'),'a'))

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Re: How to count # of occurrences of a character inside a string in Flow?

Hi @abm,

Thank you for your swift response! I tried it but seem to get 1 to many? For example "a,a,b" shows "3". Any clue why? 🙂

Thank you!

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abm abm 32,858 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Re: How to count # of occurrences of a character inside a string in Flow?

Hi @Anonymous

I should have mentioned earlier that you need length - 1. So in your case for a,a,b it is going to split as follows.

[

"",

",",

",b"

]

Total three array cells. Try to use

sub(length(split(variables('Text'),'a')), 1)

If there are no matches this will return zero.

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Re: How to count # of occurrences of a character inside a string in Flow?

Hi again @abm,

Thank you - it works like a charm! Well done 🙂 However, I just can seem to understand what exactly the lenght() function is counting? I have tried breaking it done function by function, but still don't understand how works.

Anyhow, thanks again!

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jelittle 15 on at

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Re: How to count # of occurrences of a character inside a string in Flow?

the Split function splits the string into different elements of an array, so split("hello-World", "-"), would be equal too ["hello","World"], length counts the number of elements in the array so length(["hello", "world"]) is 2, which means there are n-1 instances of "-"

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