SPUG: Counting the number of instances in a string using Perl's regexes...

[Joel Grow]

Jonathan Gardner wrote:

> Say I had a string with a whole bunch of characters -
> "asdfjkhafjklhaf".
>
> How would I go about counting the number of individual characters
> (say, 'a')?


Here's 2 ways.  If you're unfamiliar with the tr operator, see pages
155-157 of the new Camel for an explanation of transliteration.

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

# Or,
my $count = ($string =~ tr/a/a/);

Joel


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