my $count = ($string =~ s/(foo)/$1/g); will also do the trick. Benchmarking is left as an exercise for the discerning acolyte.

The match operator (/foo/) only returns a boolean to indicate that it did or did not match. Our friend Mr. Substitution gives us more data. tr/// is probably much faster for simple substrings, not regex's.

In reply to Try the Substitution Operator by chromatic
in thread Counting Substrings in Strings by CmdrTaco

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