On Thu, Feb 05, 2009 at 02:31:24PM +0100, Ivan Voras wrote: > The problem is how to do it efficiently. I see there isn't a built-in > function that counts character occurrences so I'd have to write it > myself. An additional constraint is that it must be implemented with > built-in capabilities, i.e. SQL and plpsql languages. I can do it the > brute force way, looping over the string and processing one by one > character with substring(), but is there a faster way? # select length(regexp_replace('/some/string/with/slashes', '[^/]+', '', 'g')); length -------- 4 (1 row) depesz -- Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/depesz / blog: http://www.depesz.com/ jid/gtalk: depesz@xxxxxxxxxx / aim:depeszhdl / skype:depesz_hdl / gg:6749007 -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance