I can't guess what =()= is supposed to do.

How strange, it is a very common Perl idiom:

my $count =()= /$regex/g

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Maybe this is similar to this regex construct, which I use even though it looks very non-intuitive to me: 
my ($match) = ($string =~ m/regex/);

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Why so? Incidentally I think you want a /g in the match, and the second pair of parens is clearly unnecessary.

Update: did a Super Search and added link to the explanation of the idiom

In reply to Re^4: Cool example of list assignment usage by blazar
in thread Cool example of list assignment usage by blazar

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