I feel really stupid but I have been working half the night and i feel stupid

I have a character string which can be of variable length

There are 20 variations of the string

I need to find the position of the - * in each string so that I know the length of the preceeding text

Examples

colin*ssssss so that the answer is 6

colinnorth*cccc - here the answer is 11

I feel daft for asking