number of times a substring met in a string

[Asher Tarnopolski]

hi,
i wanna run on mysql table a method which will return the
entries where a substring is met a wanted number of times in a varchar type field.
for example, let's say there are 4 entries, which varchar field look like this :
------------------
| a |
------------------
| aaa |
------------------
| abacad |
------------------
| bagafaca |
------------------
i wanna get all lines where "a" is met 3 times, so second and third lines only will be returned.
i didn't find any mysql function which seems to be helpful, may be you have ideas about it?
thanx

[Joe Ess]

SQL LIKE might get you what you want, but you will probably have to do some extra work to weed out the strings that contain more than the given number of substrings.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Joe is right about the like. If you use two like statements, you can get what you are looking for. Keep in mind that this query is probably slow.
select * from table where field like "%a%a%a%"
and field not like "%a%a%a%a%"