I only want to count the "." on the left side of the string until i hit
another character other than a "."

"JLatham" wrote:

Well, if "left most" means all but the last one, then just modify the formula
to
=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,".","") -1

but if there's some other definition of "left most", then to come up with a
solution we need a clearer definition.


"TCF" wrote:

I have seen how to count the number of occurances of a particular character,
but is there a way to limit the count to just the left most characters? here
is my example

...PLATE - WELD, TAPPED, .312 - 18

i want to count only the left most "." in this case, it would be 3. If I
use the

=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,".","") i get 4 because of the . in the .312.

any help would be appreciated.

thanks