Following on from this:-

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/217835/

I have a table containing several thousand DNA sequences (single strings of ATCG) and I want to search for the number of times any short string of ATCG occurs in the DNA. Thats all sorted for using pattercount.

Now though I want to create families of the search strings (containing maybe <50) and get the total number of pattercounts for the family.

The families can be in Value lists or as separate tables for each family it doesn't matter.

After some searching I tried:-

PatternCount(text;List(Family1::Searchstring)) where the search strings are in a related table but this doesn't work.

Thanks.

You could loop through each item in the family, performing a patterncount for each of them separately, and add up the total found count.