Counting number of occurrences of a string inside another (Perl)

Question

What is the fastest way to count the number of times a certain string appears in a bigger one? My best guess would be to replace all instances of that string with nothing, c

Answer 1

my $string = "aaaabbabbba";
my @count = ($string =~ /a/g);
print @count . "\n";

or

my $count = ($string =~ s/a/a/g);