If I understand correctly, your problem is that you're looking for /\sx y\s/ repeatedly, but your search pattern includes the spaces on either side. So the first match consumes the following space, making it unavailable to be matched as the preceeding space for the next match. If you really need the spaces you could do /(?<=\s)$pattern(?=\s)/ but you might do better with /\b$pattern\b/. Additonally, you can get the count just by doing 
my $count = () = $currentline =~ /\b$pattern\b/g;

[download]
Which evaluates the match in list context, creating a list of all matches. It then assigns that in scalar context (which produces a count of the elements) to $count.

Although, none of this will match your string of abxyxyp, because it doesn't have any spaces at all, so I suspect you mistyped that.

In reply to Re: while =~ consecutive matching problem by Eimi Metamorphoumai
in thread while =~ consecutive matching problem by p.s

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