Re: counting the number of occurrances of a word using regex

And in the spirit of TIMTOWTDI:

my $string = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.";
my $count = 0;
$count++ while $string =~ /(the)/gi;
[download]

This is useful if, for example, you want to operate on a particular occurence of a match. For example, if you wanted to grab the second occurence of particular item in every line of log file:

while (<IN_FILE>) {
  my $count = 0;
  MATCH: while (/(\Q$some_string\E)/gi) {
    $count++;
    if ( 2 == $count ) {
      # do something
      last MATCH;
    }
  }
}
[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.
Silence is Evil (feel free to copy and distribute widely - note copyright text)

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Re: counting the number of occurrances of a word using regex by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Dec 03, 2002 at 12:40 UTC
There's no point in putting parenthesis around the search pattern, is there? I find it remarkably that 3 out of the 5 followups so far put parenthesis around the search pattern, without using `$1`. Abigail	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: counting the number of occurrances of a word using regex by Ovid (Cardinal) on Dec 03, 2002 at 16:46 UTC
You're right. I was just a-cuttin' and a-pastin' and not paying attention. That's a very bad habit of mine. Thanks for the reminder. Cheers, Ovid New address of my CGI Course. Silence is Evil (feel free to copy and distribute widely - note copyright text)	[reply]