Elegant, but deviates from OP's spec, in that the character-count before the first "FOO" (or "cat") and after the last are reported in the output.

At risk of being bitten again by my blindspots, I see no way to force split alone (or even with a LIMIT) to do the job by itself. OTOH, adding a simple regex to remove the chars before the first delimiter and after the last would work nicely.

In reply to Re^2: How can I count characters between two same substrings in a string where the substring is repeated more than 5 times? by ww
in thread How can I count characters between two same substrings in a string where the substring is repeated more than 5 times? by supriyoch_2008

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