$_ = <<SENTENCE;
There once was a doggy in the window. I went into the store 
and inquired about the price, the doggy was too nice to ever 
think twice, so now I have a doggy to care for.
SENTENCE
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my @vowels = ( /[aeiuo]/gi );
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my @vowels = ( /[aeiou]|y(?![aeiou])/gi );
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By putting the "g" modifier on the regex ("match globally" -- i.e. find all occurrences of the pattern), and putting the whole thing in a list context (assigning to an array), all the matches are captured as array elements.

update: Some "grammar police" might insist that "y" can only function as a vowel when there is no other vowel either before or after it -- e.g. "y" is not a vowel in "clay" (just as "w" is not a vowel in "claw"). Still, it seems like it has to be a vowel in cases like "rhythm". Those who hold this position would make the regex like this:

my @vowels = ( /[aeiou]|(?<![aeiou])y(?![aeiou])/gi );
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Thank you. This is what i wanted to do.

Hi, digging up an old thread. Here's my version of when to use "an" or "a" before a word. Treats ura*, uga*, uni* as non-vowels. Honest and Hour have silent consonants. Have I missed out anything? Or is there a better way to do this?

if ( $something =~ /^[aeiou]/i && $something !~ /(un|uga|ura)/i || $so
+mething =~ /hour/i || something =~ /honest/i ) {
        # First letter of $something is a vowel
        $print = "an $something";
} else {
        $print = "a $something";
}
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The thread wasn't really about handling "a" vs. "an" correctly, but that's okay. As for your code snippet... apart from forgetting the "$" on the fourth mention of "something", there are some problems...

Since your three "exceptional case" conditions are not anchored to be string-initial, they'll misfire on words like "aunt", "aura", "man-hour", "dishonest", etc. Also, after you fix the anchoring, don't forget that adjectives can occur between the indefinite article and the noun, and many adjectives can begin with "un" as a negative prefix -- e.g. if your code snippet is preceded by:

$something = "untimely death";
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you will get Bad English ("a" instead of "an"). In fact, it's pretty hard to handle word-initial "u" -- consider "unanswered" vs. "unanimous", "uninformed" vs. "uniform", etc. (And folks may disagree about cases like "Ugandan", "Ugaritic" and even "Uruguayan".) And then there's all those words starting with "eur"... Unless you take the time to plug in a pronouncing dictionary, you'll just have to put up with some mistakes.

Still, here's a stab that tries to handle most cases in a reasonable way -- note how it sets the initial "u" problem apart as a separate condition, allowing it to be more complicated all by itself. (This code can be run with target words as command-line args, but the subroutine is self-contained and easy to modularize.)

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

sub indef_article
{
    local $_ = shift;
    my $article;
    if ( /^(e)?u(\w+)/i ) {
        my $e = $1;
        local $_ = $2;
        $article = ( $e or /^(?:nanim|ni(?!n)|[gr][aeu])/i ) ? "a" : "
+an";
        # assumes y-glide pronunciations for Uruguay, Uganda, etc.
    }
    else {
        $article = ( /^(?:[aeio]|ho(?:ur|nest))/i ) ? "an" : "a";
    }
    return "$article $_";
}

print indef_article( $_ ).$/ for ( @ARGV );
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$sentence =~ y/aeiou//cd;
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Thanking you also.

If what you want is to end up with a histogram-like structure, stuff the found vowels into a hash. You may try something like this:

my $phrase = 'There once was a doggy in the window. I went into the st
+ore and inquired about the price, the doggy was too nice to ever thin
+k twice, so now I have a doggy to care for.';

my %vowels;
while ($phrase =~ /([aeiou])/gi) {
    $vowels{lc $1}++;
}

use YAML;
print Dump \%vowels;

__END__


the output would look like

---
a: 8
e: 17
i: 11
o: 15
u: 2
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use YAML means can u explain

See use and YAML.

The use statement loads the module YAML.

If it's the latter you're after, try this:

my $string = "There once was a doggy in the window. I went into the st
+ore and inquired about the price, the doggy was too nice to ever thin
+k twice, so now I have a doggy to care for.";

$string =~ s/[aeiou]//gi;
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:)