Finding Patterns in String of Text in One Column

Hello Excel Forum,

I am trying to figure out how to document and tabulate the patterns that might exist in a list of text. With the list of text below, if I set a parameter like the number of times the same 3 subjects repeat themselves or if I wanted to say the same time a pair repeat themselves, how would I do this?

For example, I would like it to spit out something along the lines of:

FHB F2H = 2
FHB F2P = 1

FHB
F2P
FNR
FWH
FWH
F2H
F2H
FHB
FHB
FHB
F2H
F2H
FNR
FNR
F2H
F2H
FHB
FHB
F2H
FWH
F2P
F2P


With this small set of data, there aren't any patterns where 3 subjects repeat but some of our data sets are significantly larger. The goal is to determine over a large data set, if the same subjects follow each other. All these subjects listed above are in order in which they interacted with the apparatus, but we want to know if the same two or three subjects followed each other.

Let me know. This might not make a lot of sense so please, ask questions Thank you.

Sktneer, this is the right idea except the formula is based on the fact that I can identify all the patterns upfront and just need to have them counted.

However, I have a long lists of data with thousands of possible patterns. I can't possible write out all the patterns first, then simply count them. Imagine when I move to patterns of 3 or 4 subjects, the possible combinations get even greater when you have 25 unique subjects in the experiment. Therefore, I am looking for something that would identity patterns of 2, 3 or 4 as well as provide a count of how many times those patterns repeated themselves.

Let me know if you have any suggestions for that.