Tip's Corner: counting how many times a character is in a string

Believe it or not, among the dozens of Oracle's built-in SQL functions, there is none for counting the occurrences of a specific character in a source string.

The lack of this function forced me to come up with a quick and dirty solution:

select
:str as "string",
:chr as "character",
length(:str) - length(translate(:str,chr(0)||:chr,chr(0))) as "count"
from dual;

string	character	count
AB^CDE^FGHI^JK^^LMNOPQ^RST^UVWX^YZ	^	8

Note: this works on the assumption that you are never going to count character zero.

Anyone else with a better/faster idea?