SQL function to get count of how many times string appears in column?

Question

Is there a function for MySQL that will count the number of times a string occurs in another string or column? Basically I want:

SELECT
    SUB_COUNT('my word', `my_column`) AS `match_count`
FROM `table`

Thanks!

EDIT: I need to know how many times the string appears in a column for each row in a SELECT.

Solution 1

An obvious but unscalable way is like this

(LENGTH(`my_column`) - LENGTH(REPLACE(`my_column`, 'my word', '')))/LENGTH('my word')

Have you investigated Full Text search in MySQL?

Solution 2

Depends what you mean by "string occurs" - as a substring or as full value?

Full value case:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM my_table WHERE my_column = 'my word';

Substring case:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM my_table WHERE my_column LIKE '%my word%';