Counting occurences of text in column

I am stumped with wild cards.

I have col F which has text entires.

Example Col F:
NIGHT
COLD NIGHT
NIGHT WIND
Day
Day light
In NIGHT TIME

My end goal is to count the entries in col F that contain the word
NIGHT, but the wildcards are not working for me. The above example would be 4.

The following formula works for entries of just NIGHT alone
=COUNTIF(F1:F100000,“NIGHT”)
But I would like to count those cells that may have NIGHT in the middle of text, beginning or at the end.

I tried =COUNTIF(F1:F100000,"*.NIGHT.*") <== NOTE there should be an asterisk before and after periods in the string although they are not showing up in the post. (Edited for readability: The asterisks are present now. Use the code tool.) (Editing again: See also the comment by the OQ below.)
Returns nothing in the box.

Office Libre Ver. 5.0.6.3

I am sure this is something simple but after 4 hours of messing and searching for an answer, I give up.

The regular expression you need should be .*NIGHT.*. You may also change the settings to ‘Enable wildcards in formulae’. In this case your search expression should be *NIGHT*. (This variant is by far less powerful.)

Thank you Lupp.
By checking the box [Enable regular expressions in formulas]
found in Preferences>LibreOffice Calc>Calculate.

Everything I was trying to do became possible!!!

Thank you floris v for the help with syntax. But even when the syntax was entered correctly it didn’t work because the above mentioned check box.

It doesn’t matter now. But the edit for readability is incorrect. “*.NIGHT.*” is what I meant.

@bobthewatercat: I relied on your explanation “…there should be an asterisk before and after periods…”.
Nonetheless I will edit the question regarding the new information.

There should only be an asterisk following the period, not before. An asterisk at the start of the search expression wouldn’t even be correct - it requires a character or an expression to its left.

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