in reply to Counting Characters

Or you could be really gross, and use a regexp: 
$_ = "This is a test\nMore Test";

$len = s/(.)/$1/gs;

print $len;

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I'm convinced there is a way to do this with m//, but durned if I can figure it out. Ovid is the regexp guru around here (at least, I think so).

--Chris

e-mail jcwren

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RE: RE: Counting Characters
by Ovid (Cardinal) on Jul 14, 2000 at 19:34 UTC
    Contrary to what jcwren says, I would hardly label myself a regex guru, but thanks for the compliment :)

    As far as I can tell, you can't use the match operator to return the length. The closest I came up with is a variation of Ozymandias' response: 

    $string = "This is a test\nMore Test"; 
$len++ for ($string =~ /./sg);
print $len;

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    In the Perl Cookbook, it has a recipe for finding the nth occurence of a match, but that also uses a loop. If you could enumerate matches with a straight regex, you could construct a well-defined regex and skip the loop in the Cookbook.

    Believe me, I tried :) If any monks would like to tackle this, I'd love to be proven wrong (and I'm sure it would be something ridiculously simple).

    Update: And in my quest to come up with horribly unoptimized code: 

    $_ = "This is a test\nMore Test";
$len = (split //);
print $len;

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    Or you can use this beauty (no, I'm not serious): 
    $string = "This is a test\nMore Test";
$len = (grep /./s, (@chars = split //, $string));

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    No, I don't suggest using them. I just had to toss it out because no one else had mentioned it :)
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