Esteemed monks -

I am trying to extract from a regular expression the number of times certain strings ('a' and 'b' in the example below) occur in a given matcher string. 
my @strings = qw( aaabbbb ab abb aabb aaabb aabbb );

for my $string ( @strings )
{
    my $a_counter = 0;
    my $b_counter = 0;
    print "In $string there were $a_counter 'a's and $b_counter 'b's. 
+\n" if ( $string =~ /(a(?{$a_counter ++;}))+(b(?{$b_counter ++;}))+/ 
+);
}

[download]
To my surprise this only works on the first iteration. Can you please let me know why? Could this have to do with the match position not getting reset? I am at a loss ...

Thanks in advance for your help and best regards -

Pat

In reply to Extracting the number of repetitions from a regex by pat_mc

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