Rich Heilman presented a nice approach for this here on SCN some time ago (can't find the thread just now... 
)
So this works like this:
select length ('xyz,abc,cde,wer,123,fr,g') - length ( replace ('xyz,abc,cde,wer,123,fr,g', ',', '')) from dummy
Which tells us that you miscounted and that the result actually is 6 
- Lars