Rudy Zung wrote: >I don't think Oracle has a built-in function for that, but you can = >cobble one >together with: > length(myString) - nvl(length(replace(myString, 'O')), 0) > >...Rudy > > Oracle 10g has a full spread of regular expression functions which can do pretty much anything that perl can do, albeit without the elegance and beauty characteristic for the mother other of all scripting languages, to use sadamesque terminology. There is an O'Reilly book about the regular expressions in Oracle 10g, written by this list's respected member, Mr. Jonathan Gennick. Jonathan is, however, missing from the list for several months. Counting appearances of a single character shouldn't be a problem. -- Mladen Gogala Oracle DBA Ext. 121 -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l