I don't know of a special variable for that but you can get the number of matches the following way

my @matches;
....
while(<>) {
    my @matches    = $_ =~ m/$string/g;
    my $repetition = @matches;
    print "$string was encountered $repetition times.\n" if($repetitio
+n > 0); 
}

[download]

As for your second question, you are not closing the code tag correctly. You are using '\' where it should be '/'. So the closing tag should read </code>

update added the g modifier to the regexp. Thanks wfsp and Fletch for alerting me it was missing. It not being there was a typo. I tested it with the code shown bellow, but when adapting the test code to the block shown on the OP somehow the 'g' was skiped.

use strict;
use warnings;

my $text = "match other match not useful match sample word";
my $string = "match";
my @matches = $text =~ m/$string/g;
my $count = @matches;
print $count;

[download]

In reply to Re: How can I access the number of repititions in a regex? by olus
in thread How can I access the number of repititions in a regex? by pat_mc

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