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

Try this:

my $string = "one.two.three.four";
my ($number) = scalar( @{[ $string=~/\./gi ]} );

It returns 3 for me. By creating a reference to an array the regular expression is evaluated in list context and the @{..} de-references the array reference.