12/15   How would I count the number of occurances of a pattern in Perl?
        \_ the easy but incorrect way to do it is grep pattern file | wc -l
        \_ In a single line?  In a file?  In what?
          \_ Find pattern.  $count++;
             \_ Yeah, this would work if I'm feeding a for loop line by
                line. But what if you have say $foo = "aaabbbaaacccaaa"
                and you want to count the number of times 'aaa' appears?
                \_ Use the same algorithm.  Implement "find pattern" differently.
                   Twink.  Try while ($foo =~ m/pat/g) { $count++ } or
                   $count = length($foo =~ m/pat/g);
                   \_ Thanx, but can anyone ask anything on this motd without
                      being branded a twink? I guarantee you there is not
                      one question here that someone won't think is trivial
                      or self-evident or just plain dumb.
                \_ you then have to decide if "aaaaaa" matches with "aaa"
                   once, twice, or 5 times.
        \_ troll deleted                                        -tom
        \_ tr/// it into its identical string/pattern and catch the returned
                result in a variable.  The result will be the number of times
                the translation (in this case the null translation) was
                performed.  Example from camel book:
                        $cnt = $sky =~ tr/*/*/;  # count the stars in $sky
                                                        -brain