[Solved] Counting occurrence of specific character in cell

[hypersapien]

I'm a novice at formulas, and I tried to search for the answer to this, but I'm only finding how to get complete word/character counts.

I need a formula that will look at a cell and let me specify a character, hyphen ( - ) in my case, and tell me how many times that character appeared in that cell.

So if my A1 cell is [DST-U, ARC-U], I need the formula to return "2". Could any one help me with this?

[Villeroy]

B1 =ISNUMBER(FIND("-";A1)) finds the first occurrence
C1 =ISNUMBER(FIND("-";$A1;B1+1)) finds the next occurrence
copy C1 to the right and get the sum of B1:X1

[MrProgrammer]

Hi, and welcome to the forum.

=LEN(cell)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(cell;"-";""))

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[hypersapien]

Thanks to both of you. I couldn't get Villeroy's method to work (i just got an endless row of 'TRUE' cells), but Mr's did work for me.

Mr, if I can question you further I'd like to ask how that formula works to help me learn. If I'm understanding it correctly, it is asking for the total number of characters in that cell, and then it subtracts the amount of characters in the cell minus the number of hyphens. Is this correct?

If so, then does the SUBSTITUTE portion work by replacing they hyphen ("-") with nothing ("") ?

[MrProgrammer]

SUBSTITUTE replaces each hyphen ("-") with nothing (""), that is, it deletes them. The difference between the LEN functions is the number of characters deleted, which is the count of the hyphens.