Many will not understand the perlsecret, Goatse; those that do may wish they didn't. All you really need is: 

$PipeCounter = y/|/|/;

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See also perlfaq4 How can I count the number of occurrences of a substring within a string? - which politely avoids the word goatse by creatively describing the code, without evoking a hard-to-forget mental picture, as a global match in list context ;-)

In reply to Re^2: Count number of characters in a DATA block by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Count number of characters in a DATA block by Trudge

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