Description
Counts the number of occurrences of a substring in a string, returning 1 if the there are no occurrences of the substring in the string. (Introduced in OpenInsight 4.1.2.)
Syntax
instances = DCount (source_string, search_string)
Parameters
The DCount function has the following parameters.
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| source_string | Identifies the string to search for in search_string. Can be a literal string, expression, constant, or variable. |
| search_string | Identifies the string to search for in source_string. search_string may be a literal string, expression, constant, or variable. If search_string does not appear in source_string, or if search_string is null, a 0 (zero) will be returned. |
The Count() and DCount() functions are usually used to determine the size of a dynamic array. They actually have more general purpose use, because the search string can be any string used as a delimiter, even multiple character strings.
Note: To count the number of values in a dynamic array, you need to account for the possibility that the array has one value, with no delimiter. The count() function in this case will return 0 because there is no delimiter in the string. To return the correct answer (1), you need to add the boolean expression ( var # ), which returns 1 if the variable contains a value but 0 if it is null. See the example below.
Note: If you use dcount() to count the number of values in a dynamic array, you do not need to add the boolean expression because dcount() returns the proper result (1) if the array has one value with no delimiter.
See Also
Example
* count the number of items in an @fm-delimited list declare function dcount cnt = dcount(List, @fm)
1 Comment
Don Bakke
In OpenInsight 9, if source_string is unassigned, it will get assigned an empty string and not raise an error. In OpenInsight 10, this will product a VNAV error within the DCount function.