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

Is the following code a one-liner?

print $string =~ s/\./\./g;

Answer 2

That puts the regex itself in scalar context, which isn't what you want. Instead, put the regex in list context (to get the number of matches) and put that into scalar context.

 my $number = () = $string =~ /\./gi;

Answer 3

I noticed that if you have an OR condition in your regular expression (eg /(K..K)|(V.AK)/gi ) then the array produced may have undefined elements which are included in the count at the end.

For example:

my $seq = "TSYCSKSNKRCRRKYGDDDDWWRSQYTTYCSCYTGKSGKTKGGDSCDAYYEAYGKSGKTKGGRNNR";
my $regex = '(K..K)|(V.AK)';
my $count = () = $seq =~ /$regex/gi;
print "$count\n";

Gives a value of count of 6.

I found the solution in this post How do I remove all undefs from array?

my $seq = "TSYCSKSNKRCRRKYGDDDDWWRSQYTTYCSCYTGKSGKTKGGDSCDAYYEAYGKSGKTKGGRNNR";
my $regex = '(K..K)|(V.AK)';
my @count = $seq =~ /$regex/gi;
@count = grep defined, @count; 
my $count = scalar @count;
print "$count\n";

Which then gives the correct answer of three.

Answer 4

Also, see Perlfaq4 :

There are a number of ways, with varying efficiency. If you want a count of a certain single character (X) within a string, you can use the tr/// function like so:

$string = "ThisXlineXhasXsomeXx'sXinXit";
$count = ($string =~ tr/X//);
print "There are $count X characters in the string";

This is fine if you are just looking for a single character. However, if you are trying to count multiple character substrings within a larger string, tr/// won't work. What you can do is wrap a while() loop around a global pattern match. For example, let's count negative integers:

$string = "-9 55 48 -2 23 -76 4 14 -44";
while ($string =~ /-\d+/g) { $count++ }
print "There are $count negative numbers in the string";

Another version uses a global match in list context, then assigns the result to a scalar, producing a count of the number of matches.

$count = () = $string =~ /-\d+/g;

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

another way,

my $string = "one.two.three.four";
@s = split /\./,$string;
print scalar @s - 1;