Searching no. of times the pattern occurs in the data

agynr has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello Everybody, I want to search for a pattern like this '(a\s*bcd\s*e)(f\s*ghi)(jkl\s*tr) in a file. (The characters and the spaces can change in the pattern to be searched). I want to find the no. of occurences of the particular pattern in the file and if the pattern occurs once then I had to extract $1,$2,$3 and the pos of that found pattern. I am able to do like this

$pattern = (reement\s*PFPC\s*receives\s*fees\s*at\s*annual\s*rate\s*of
+\s*)(#.{0,3}#)(\s*\s*of\s*average\s*net\s*asset\s*value\s*of\s*outsta
+nding\s*In\s*)
while ($data =~m/$pattern/gi)
{                
        $counter_number_of_search+=1;
                
}    
if ($counter_number_of_search == 1)
{
    ##### Do some operation ########
}
else
{
        #######   increase the margin to search #####
}
[download]

How can I find out the no. of occurences of the string in the data without going into the while loop. Please get a way out!!!!

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Re: Searching no. of times the pattern occurs in the data by prasadbabu (Prior) on Feb 12, 2005 at 05:22 UTC
hi agynr, you can make use of undef $/;, and replace all the pattern using g. I have used $& which will take lots of memory and the process will be slow.To avoid that you can assign to another variable and replace with empty string instead of $&. `undef $/; my ($count) = $data =~ s/((a\sbcd\se)(f\sghi)(jkl\str))/$&/gsi;` [download] Prasad	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Searching no. of times the pattern occurs in the data by Roy Johnson (Monsignor) on Feb 12, 2005 at 15:04 UTC
If you put the pattern in a lookahead and replace with nothing, you'll save CPU cycles: `my $count = s/(?=$pat)//gsi;` [download] If there are no capturing parentheses in the expression, you can simply use the match operator instead. `my $count = () = /$pat/gsi;` [download] Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.	[reply] [d/l] [select]