I'm starting to think that I might need to use a while loop that uses a counter to substring the word and then increment its starting point by one until the end of the string.

That was my first thought, and probably how I'd do it. Here's another way that might entertain you, 

local $_ = 'computer';

my @results;
pos() -= 2, push @results, $1  while /(...)/g;

print "@results", $/;

[download]
We need to keep subtracting one less than the length of the match from pos to match the overlapping strings.

After Compline,
Zaxo

In reply to Re: finding number of contiguous letters by Zaxo
in thread finding number of contiguous letters by Marknel

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