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

Friedo's method is: $a = () = $b =~ $c.

But it's possible to simplify this even further to just ($a) = $b =~ $c, like so :

my ($matchcount) = $text =~ s/$findregex/ /gi;

You could thank just wrap this up in a function, getMatchCount(), and not worry about it destroying the passed string.

On the other hand, you can add in a swap, which may be a bit more computation, but does not result in altering the string.

my ($matchcount) = $text =~ s/($findregex)/$1/gi;