Here is a simple way to get a specific character count (for example, count the number of occurences of the character ‘0’) and the word count of a varchar string using T-SQL.

-- Count the number of specific characters, in this case, ‘0’

Declare @value varchar(100)

Set @value = 'SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008'

Select Len(@value) - Len(Replace(@value, '0', ''))

 

-- Count the number of words

DECLARE @String VARCHAR(100)

SELECT @String = 'SQL Server 2005 Stan test code'

SELECT LEN(@String) - LEN(REPLACE(@String, ' ', '')) + 1

As you see this is quite straightforward, the script simply substract the length of the string minus the character searched from the full length of the string, giving as a result the character count. The script counting words is simply counting the space characters.

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