If this seems a little hard to follow for someone who is new to Perl, here is a version that works very similarly to kcott's code. However, even for those who find his code hard to follow (or maybe especially those who find it hard to follow), it is worth the trouble to understand the way the pattern is built and the way it is used with named captures.

use strict; use warnings;

my @eachline = (
  "transaction blah find blah blah think blah save_param",
  "start_sub blah url blah blah submit transaction blah find"
);

my @keywords = qw{transaction find think save_param start_sub url subm
+it};

my %count;

for my $line (@eachline) {
  for my $pattern (@keywords) {
    $count{$pattern} += ($line =~ /$pattern/g);
  }
}

print "No. of matches for $_ is $count{$_}\n" for @keywords;
[download]

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.