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

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Posted on 15 Oct 2019 11:37:52 by Community Power Pla...

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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jelittle 15 on 10 Mar 2023 at 22:08:45

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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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Community Power Pla... on 15 Oct 2019 at 15:54:34

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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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abm abm 32,575 Most Valuable Professional on 15 Oct 2019 at 15:18:19

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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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Community Power Pla... on 15 Oct 2019 at 13:13:32

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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 32,575 Most Valuable Professional on 15 Oct 2019 at 12:22:54

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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'))

If this reply has answered your question or solved your issue, please mark this question as answered. Answered questions helps users in the future who may have the same issue or question quickly find a resolution via search. If you liked my response, please consider giving it a thumbs up.

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