Can Powerbi count multiple occurrences of a specific text within a cell? - count

Question

What i am trying to find out is, for example let's take as an example the following table:
| Col 1 | Col 2 |
|-------|---------|
| ab | 1 |
| ab ab | 2 |
| ac | 1 |
| ae | 1 |
| ae ae | 2 |
| af | 1 |
So basically if there are two occurrences of the same item in the cell, I want to display 2 in the next column. If there are 3, then 3 and so on. The thing is that I am looking for specific strings most of the time. Its a text and number string.
Is this doable in Power BI?

Answer 1

Assuming you want to count the number of occurrences of the first non-space characters that occur before the first separating space, you can do the following:
Col 2 =
VAR Trimmed = TRIM(Table2[Col 1])
VAR FirstSpace = SEARCH(" ", Trimmed, 1, LEN(Trimmed) + 1)
VAR FirstString = LEFT(Trimmed, FirstSpace - 1)
RETURN DIVIDE(
LEN(Trimmed) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(Trimmed, FirstString, "")),
FirstSpace - 1
)
Let's go through an example to see how this works. Suppose we have a string " abc abc abc ".
The TRIM function removes any extraneous spaces at the beginning an end, so Trimmed = "abc abc abc".
The FirstSpace searches for the first space in Trimmed. In this case, FirstSpace = 4. (If there is no first space, then we define FirstSpace to be the length of Trimmed + 1 so the next part works correctly.)
The FirstString uses FirstSpace to find the first chunk. In this case, FirstString = "abc".
Finally, we use SUBSTITUTE to replace each FirstString with an empty string (leaving only the middle spaces) and look at how that changes the length of Trimmed. We know LEN(Trimmed) = 11 and LEN(" ") = 2, so the difference is the 9 characters we removed by substitution. We know that the 9 characters are n copies of FirstString, "abc" and we know the length of FirstString is FirstSpace - 1 = 3.
Thus we can solve 3n = 9 for n to get n = 9/3 = 3, the count of the "abc" substrings.