Counting Substrings in Strings

[CmdrTaco]

Whats a clean way to count the occurances of a substring withing a string? I've been using $x++ while /foo/g; to count the occurances of 'foo' within $_, but it really seems like $x=/foo/g; ought to (in scaler context) return a count, but for some reason it always returns either undef or 1 (eg, a boolean).

[chromatic]

my $count = ($string =~ s/(foo)/$1/g); will also do the trick. Benchmarking is left as an exercise for the discerning acolyte.

The match operator (/foo/) only returns a boolean to indicate that it did or did not match. Our friend Mr. Substitution gives us more data. tr/// is probably much faster for simple substrings, not regex's.

[pschoonveld]

$count = $string =~ tr/x/x/; Will make $count = num of x's in $string.

[audreyt]

Please use a list context switcher. :)

$text = 'asdasd';
$count = () = $text =~ /asd/g;