I suggest using grep to search strings in array, or to find number of elements matching a criteria. The points are demonstrated in the code below:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;


my @GrepList = ("yesterday", "today", "tomorrow") ;
# look for all elements with "to" in the string 
my @ElementList = grep(/to/i, @GrepList) ;

print Dumper(@ElementList);

## In list context, returns the count of number of elements 
## that meet the search criteria
my $ElementsFound = grep(/to/i, @GrepList) ;

print $ElementsFound;
[download]

Hope this helps
May the force be with you