Is there a Perl shortcut to count the number of matches in a string?

Question

Suppose I have:

my $string = \"one.two.three.four\";

How should I play with context to get the number of times the pattern found a match (3

Answer 1

I think the clearest way to describe this would be to avoid the instant-cast to scalar. First assign to an array, and then use that array in scalar context. That's basically what the = () = idiom will do, but without the (rarely used) idiom:

my $string = "one.two.three.four";
my @count = $string =~ /\./g;
print scalar @count;