If you don't want to actually split but just want to know how many fields split would return, try one of the methods illustrated here:

#!perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $str = "a,b,c,d,e";
my $n = 1 + $str =~ tr/,//; # Field separator is a single char
print "$n\n";
$n = 1 + (() = $str =~ /,/g); # Field separator is a regex
print "$n\n";
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