A simple pattern matching question: I want to count the number of occurrences of "AA" in the string "AAAA". I want the answer to be 3. The standard while("AAAA" =~ /AA/g) {$count++} gives $count=2 and I can't seem to come up with a magical combination of ?,+,*,. that gives 3. Is there a way to do it this way (i.e. without resorting to looping over substrings)? perlre doesn't seem to provide an (obvious) answer and SuperSearch has (alas) failed me.