Count Characters Minus One

[barim]

I am using Len Function to count number of characters:

=LEN(A1)

Now, I have instances that I would like to count as one character and not 2. For example, instances like "DZ" or "LJ", if they exist anywhere in the word it should be counted as -1 to the total of characters. I can solve this with : =LEN(A1) -1, but I have to enter manually and it is a lot of manual work.
I have also tried this:

=IF("lj"|LEN(A1)-1|LEN(A1))

but it throws error.

Is there any way to accomplish this with formula?

Thanks.

 

[Eric W]

Maybe:

=LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"DZ","D"))

If case matters, then you may need to use UPPER. You can string multiple codes like this:

=LEN(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"DZ","*"),"LJ","*"))

 

[Fluff]

How about
=IF(OR(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("LJ",A2)),ISNUMBER(SEARCH("DZ",A2))),LEN(A2)-1,LEN(A2))
this is not case sensitive

 

[barim]

Thank you all for your replies. Fluff's formula works perfectly. For some reason Eric's formulas don't work at all, and total number has not changed. I like the idea to substitute instance of two characters and replace it with one and then make a count. Thank you again for your replies.

 

[Eric W]

It might be the upper case issue, you can try:

=LEN(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(UPPER(A1),"DZ","*"),"LJ","*"))