If I have understood the question correctly, you're looking for the spaceship goats.cx operator.

#! /usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $str = 'It was an intelligent stori';

for my $word (split / /, $str) {
    my $nr =()= $word =~ /(i)/gi;
    if ($nr > 0) {
        print "$word has $nr $1\n";
    }
}
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(No, there's not really such an operator, it's more an emergent effect of forcing a global match's list context into scalar context by assigning the result to (), the empty list).