The answer to the specific question you ask can be found in the first section of perlrequick:

Finally, the // default delimiters for a match can be changed to arbitrary delimiters by putting an 'm' out front:

    "Hello World" =~ m!World!; # matches, delimited by '!'
    "Hello World" =~ m{World}; # matches, note the matching '{}'
    "/usr/bin/perl" =~ m"/perl"; # matches after '/usr/bin',
    # '/' becomes an ordinary char
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But so you do less work up front, and endure less pain in the longrun, you might benefit from one of the many HTML parsers on CPAN.

Suggest you check the available modules with "parse" and/or "html" in their names; read their docs or at least each precis; and then pick one.

Update: just checked. In less than 2 months, you've posted nearly 50 questions. Perhaps you've seen this advice before in reply to one or more of them: study a good introductory text ("Learning Perl" for example); read the tuts here and also look around the Monastery for highly regarded, free tuts available at some (emphasis, "some;" as not all are worth the powder to blow them to hell) on-line college level tuts or courses; and study (hint: google site:perlmonks.org terms terms terms... or Super Search here) nodes that show how others dealt with your problem(s).

robertw: Please use  <c> ... </c> or  <code> ... </code> tags to enclose things like  "aug</td>" or  aug</td> that will otherwise render as HTML (since they include valid HTML tags!). (Didn't your post appear a bit strange to you when you previewed it?) Please see Markup in the Monastery and Writeup Formatting Tips.

Thanks guys:), the ironic statements are well deserved yes I knowxD, and I did not notice the missing tags, my apologies for that

Here is a start. The regular expression gets the size of the array returned by the regular expression, which uses () to enclose the text to be searched for and /g to find all the occurences.

use feature ":5.14";
use warnings FATAL => qw(all);
use strict;

my $h = "aaa bbb ccc aaa aaa";
say scalar (() = $h=~m(aaa)g);
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Produces

3

Have you tried feeding the goat(se)?

$count =()= $html =~ m{aug</td>}g;
print $count;
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Update: Didn't see AnomalousMonk's posting already mentioning this...

Pull hard. When it breaks, where the slash in the string was will be obvious :)

perl -e '$str=q (usr/bin); print index($str,q(/))."\n";'
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3
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Not sure if I'm understanding the problem. You can search for a special character putting a "\" before "my_special_character"

count=0,
while ($html =~ [aug<\/td>]g) { $count++ }
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count=0,
while ($html =~ [aug<\/td>]g) { $count++ }
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Please don't post code that won't work – or, in this case, even compile. (Or if the code is untested, please flag the fact prominently.) A beginning Perler, even one as reluctant as robertw to read basic documentation, deserves better of us.

>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $html = 'xxx aug</td> yyy aug</td> zzz';
 ;;
 my $count = 0;
 while ($html =~ m[aug</td>]g) { $count++ }
 print $count;
 ;;
 my $count2 =()= $html =~ m{ aug</td> }xmsg;
 print $count2;
"
2
2
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