Counting number of pattern matches in Perl - regex

Question

I am VERY new to perl, and to programming in general.
I have been searching for the past couple of days on how to count the number of pattern matches; I have had a hard time understanding others solutions and applying them to the code I have already written.
Basically, I have a sequence and I need to find all the patterns that match [TC]C[CT]GGAAGC
I believe I have that part down. but I am stuck on counting the number of occurrences of each pattern match. Does anyone know how to edit the code I already have to do this? Any advice is welcomed. Thanks!
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;
# open fasta file for reading
unless( open( FASTA, "<", '/scratch/Drosophila/dmel-all-chromosome- r6.02.fasta' )) {
die "Can't open dmel-all-chromosome-r6.02.fasta for reading:", $!;
}
#split the fasta record
local $/ = ">";
#scan through fasta file
while (<FASTA>) {
chomp;
if ( $_ =~ /^(.*?)$(.*)$/ms) {
my $header = $1;
my $seq = $2;
$seq =~ s/\R//g; # \R removes line breaks
while ( $seq =~ /([TC]C[CT]GGAAGC)/g) {
print $1, "\n";
}
}
}
Update, I have added in
my #matches = $seq =~ /([TC]C[CT]GGAAGC)/g;
print scalar #matches;
In the code below. However, it seems to be outputting 0 in front of each pattern match, instead of outputting the total sum of all pattern matches.
while (<FASTA>) {
chomp;
if ( $_ =~ /^(.*?)$(.*)$/ms) {
my $header = $1;
my $seq = $2;
$seq =~ s/\R//g; # \R removes line breaks
while ( $seq =~ /([TC]C[CT]GGAAGC)/g) {
print $1, "\n";
my #matches = $seq =~ /([TC]C[CT]GGAAGC)/g;
print scalar #matches;
}
}
}
Edit: I need the output to list ever pattern match found. I also need it to find the total number of matches found. For example:
CCTGGAAGC
TCTGGAAGC
TCCGGAAGC
3 matches found

Answer 1

counting the number of occurrences of each pattern match
my #matches = $string =~ /pattern/g
#matches array will contain all the matched parts. You can then do below to get the count.
print scalar #matches
Or you could directly write
my $matches = () = $string =~ /pattern/
I would suggest you to use the former as you might need to check "what was matched" in future (perhaps for debugging?).
Example 1:
use strict;
use warnings;
my $string = 'John Doe John Done';
my $matches = () = $string =~ /John/g;
print $matches; #prints 2
Example 2:
use strict;
use warnings;
my $string = 'John Doe John Done';
my #matches = $string =~ /John/g;
print "#matches"; #prints John John
print scalar #matches; #prints 2
Edit:
while ( my #matches = $seq =~ /([TC]C[CT]GGAAGC)/g) {
print $1, "\n";
print "Count of matches:". scalar #matches;
}

Answer 2

As you have written the code, you have to count the matches yourself:
local $/ = ">";
my $count = 0;
#scan through fasta file
while (<FASTA>) {
chomp;
if ( $_ =~ /^(.*?)$(.*)$/ms) {
my $header = $1;
my $seq = $2;
$seq =~ s/\R//g; # \R removes line breaks
while ( $seq =~ /([TC]C[CT]GGAAGC)/g) {
print $1, "\n";
$count = $count +1;
}
}
}
print "Fount $count matches\n";
should do the job.
HTH Georg

Answer 3

my #count = ($seq =~ /([TC]C[CT]GGAAGC)/g);
print scalar #count ;