Hello Narseh,
and why it should not work? As string in which you want to search the substring you can of course also reference a column.
Check following example with your sample data:
You can see that the two values with a dash shows the correct position. The last value where no dash is part of the string you get a zero (obviously I think also the last value should be 2016-march; but I used your typo to show that in case that the substring is not founda zero is returned 
).
Regards,
Florian