I would suggest just storing the matches into an array. From there, you could easily access each element and also retrieve the number of elements in that array. The untested code below illustrates my idea.

my($text) = "(network)(test)(ifcfg)";
my(@matches) = ($text =~ m/\((.*?)\)/g);
my $match_count = scalar(@matches);
print "The following $match_count matches were found:\n";
foreach my $match (@matches) {print "  $match\n";}

[download]

In the second line, I'm searching $text for all items that are within a set of parentheses and putting each match found into the @matches array. If you test this out with varying values for $test, the match finding part will still work correctly.

In reply to Re: Extracting multiple matches from Reg Ex by dasgar
in thread Extracting multiple matches from Reg Ex by rookie_monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.