Perl provides a rich language for searching for patterns within strings via its Regular Expression engine. 
perldoc perlre

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This will give you way more info than you can absorb quickly. Now, based on your original post, you want to iterate over an array and check each element for a pattern (in this case, a string) and do something each time you find a match. 
for my $line (@input) {
    if ($line =~ /$pattern/) {
        # Do something
        print "$line contains $pattern\n";
    }
}

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If you just want to get a count of lines that contain $pattern, Perl has a grep function (see perldoc -f grep for more on grep). It returns a list of matches based on some test. When evaluated in scalar context, the length of that list, or the number of matches, is returned. 
my $match_cnt = grep { $_ =~ /$pattern/ } @input;

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With Perl, there is always more that one way to do things, but some are obviously better and more appropriate based on your needs.

Ivan Heffner
Sr. Software Engineer, DAS Lead
WhitePages.com, Inc.

In reply to Re: find text in string by Codon
in thread find text in string by Anonymous Monk

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