I'm trying to get the following piece of code to read a file and count the instances of the and characters.

How do I tell Perl to ignore them as character classes and look for the actual character itself.

Also Is there a way to search for their ASCII representation values instead?

Thanks in advance. 
open (READFILE, "<readme.txt") || die "Couldn't open file: $!";
$buffer = "";

while(<READFILE>) {
    #print $_;
    $commas++ while ($_ =~ m/,/g);
    $fullstops++ while ($_ =~ m/\./g);
    $openbracket++ while ($_ =~ m/\[/g);
    $closedbracket++ while ($_ =~ m/\]/g);
    $hyphens++ while ($_ =~ m/-/g);
}

print ("$commas commas\n");
print ("$fullstops full stops\n");
print ("$openbracket open brackets\n");
print ("$closedbracket closed brackets\n");
print ("$hyphens hyphens\n");

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In reply to SOLVED Please Help by Slug

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