Ah! I missed what you were driving at, having mis-read your input as '33332' not 33,332 '3's :-(

You are quite correct, 1 while ... will make a mull of it in that case. You could keep the 1 while ... by adding the \G anchor at the beginning of the pattern but there's not really much point in doing that.

use strict;
use warnings;

my $t1;
my $t2;

$t1 = $t2 = q{3} x 33335 . q{7};
print qq{Sequences of 3s:-\n};
print qq{>@{ [ length $1 ] }<\n}
   while $t1 =~ m{(3+)}g;
print q{-} x 50, qq{\n};

1 while $t1 =~ s{\G((?:3{4})+)}{ qq{[@{ [ length $1 ] }]} }eg;
print qq{With 1 while and \\G\n$t1\n@{ [ q{-} x 50 ] }\n};

$t2 =~ s{((?:3{4})+)}{ qq{[@{ [ length $1 ] }]} }eg;
print qq{Without either\n$t2\n@{ [ q{=} x 50 ] }\n};

[download]

Produces

Sequences of 3s:-
>33335<
--------------------------------------------------
With 1 while and \G
[33332]3337
--------------------------------------------------
Without either
[33332]3337
==================================================

[download]

I'm not sure what you mean regarding saving typing as I am using Multiplicative Operators (your link is slightly broken, BTW).

Cheers,

JohnGG

Update: Further testing shows that the \G solution doesn't work with more than one group of 4 or more 3s.

In reply to Re^4: Regex exact pattern match problem! by johngg
in thread Regex exact pattern match problem! by Jts

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