[Israel.pm] count chars

[Yossi Itzkovich]

Hi,

I don't have a better solution, but I don't think it saves anything in
run time: not speed nor memory (assuming @matches goes out of scope very
soon).
To be able to return the scalar of a list, the list still needs to be
built. 

Yossi

-----Original Message-----
From: perl-bounces at perl.org.il [mailto:perl-bounces at perl.org.il] On
Behalf Of Tal Kelrich
Sent: Monday, September 03, 2007 1:49 PM
To: perl at perl.org.il
Subject: Re: [Israel.pm] count chars

On Mon, 3 Sep 2007 13:38:05 +0300
"Amir E. Aharoni" <amir.aharoni at gmail.com> wrote:

> What is the best way to count the number of times that a character
> appears in a string?
> 
> Currently i do this:
> 
> ----
> my $string = "abracadabra";
> my @matches = ($string =~ /a/g);
> print scalar @matches; # 5
> print "@matches"; # a a a a a
> ----
> 
> Is there a way to do it without the intermediate array?
> 
> This doesn't work:
> 
> ----
> my $string = "abracadabra";
> print scalar ($string =~ /a/g); # prints 1!
> ----
> 
> I can use this:
> 
> ----
> my $matches = ($string =~ s/(a)/$1/g);
> ----
> 
> It replaces the characters with itself and returns the number of
> substitutions, but it doesn't improve readability.
> 
> Any other ideas?
> 

Here's another, is ugly tho

my $string = "abracadabra";
print scalar(@{[$string=~/a/g]});

-- 
Tal Kelrich
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----
Agree with them now, it will save so much time.
----