Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!

Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

Find answers, ask questions, and share expertise about Alteryx Designer Desktop and Intelligence Suite.
SOLVED

Contains function - number of hits

janez_007
7 - Meteor

Hi everyone,

 

need support using the Contains function. I am doing a simple word search and would like to get the number of hits.

 

Example text:

A brown cat is in the garden for brown cats. 

 

Keyword:

brown cat

 

The contains function returns '-1' even though there are two hits in the sentence. Any suggestions?

 

4 REPLIES 4
nerces
8 - Asteroid

That's because the contains functions returns a TRUE or FALSE value. It does not return a count of the number of instances for your keyword.

janez_007
7 - Meteor

ok, understood, thank you for the reply.

thllm
7 - Meteor

Hi Janez,

 

You can find the solution for this by using the help documentation.

https://help.alteryx.com/current/Reference/Functions.htm

The contains formula returns a boolean value based on whether the text is contained in the field.

 

The function you want is probably Regex_CountMatches and looks like this.

REGEX_CountMatches([Sample_text], "brown cat")

 

janez_007
7 - Meteor

REGEX_CountMatches works perfectly, thank you for the suggestion.

Labels