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‎Jul 09, 2017 04:39 AM
I have a column of Attachment type. I want to create a formula based on the number of uploaded/attached files. How can I count the number of uploaded/attached files in that column?
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‎Jul 19, 2017 11:38 AM
This is a clever trick suggested by @Simon_Brown: Given an Attachment field {Attached}
, the formula to count the number of attachments is
IF(
LEN({Attached}=0,0,
LEN({Attached})-LEN(SUBSTITUTE({Attached},",",""))+1)
This works because Airtable casts {Attached}
as a comma-separated string of concatenated RECORD_ID
s. The formula then compares the length of the string with the length of the same string with commas removed (plus 1, to make sure single attachments get counted).
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‎Jul 22, 2017 03:41 AM
This workaround works! Thanks!
Just a little of syntax typo (missing closing parenthesis for first LEN):
IF(
LEN({Attached})=0,0,
LEN({Attached})-LEN(SUBSTITUTE({Attached},",",""))+1)
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‎Jul 23, 2017 02:14 AM
Thanks for the catch!
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‎Aug 03, 2022 11:13 AM
This formula gives wrong results when attachments have commas in the filename, here is one that doesn’t have this issue !
IF(Attachments = BLANK(), 0, (LEN(Attachments) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(Attachments, "https://dl.airtable.com/.attachments/", ""))) / LEN("https://dl.airtable.com/.attachments/"))
Airtable nicely adds the download address to the comma-separated list of attachments of the Formula field, and "https://dl.airtable.com/.attachments/"
is indeed much less likely to occur than innocent commas in a filename.
Credit and reference : Count multiple keywords in text - #3 by Karlstens