How do you search for more than 1 seach for more than one character in PERL (i.e search for a period,?, and c?

Question

I'm trying to make a search in PERL that searches for the occurrence of a periond, question mark, and comma.

Heres what I have so far (this just searches for 0 to 1 ?s)

open(AFILE, $ARGV[0]);

if ( =~ /\??/){
print ;
} else {
print 'no match';
}

If someone also has some time, can they explain to me why / \. / doesn't search the whole textfile for a period. Is it because I don't have a *,?, or + after the period i.e / \.+/

Answer 1

You don't need a loop to suck down a file!

my @records = ;

my $data = join('',@records);

now you have the entire file in a string.

/\??/ matches 0 to 1 question marks. (a weird pattern, everything has 0 to 1 question marks!)

my $count = $data =~ /\?/;

gives you the number of question marks.

Answer 2

The angle operator () reads only the next line from the file. The usual practice is to use a while loop to read in the whole file:
while(){
$string .= $_;
}
if($string =~ /\.\?,/){
print $string;
}else{
print "no match";
}