Let's say you have an array that contains 4 elements.

my @array = qw(orange apple peach grape pineapple);

In this example, the $count variable will contain the number of elements in @array.

my $count = @array;

You can print the $count variable;

print $count;

Which will return 5, meaning there are 5 elements in @array.

5

grep

grep can be used to count the elements in an array that contain a string. In this example, grep is used to count the number of elements in @array that contain apple.

my $count = (grep(/apple/i, @array));

Which should return 2, since both apple and pineapple contain the string "apple".

2

while loop

This is often used in conjunction with a while loop to loop through each element in the array.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my @array   = qw(value1 value2 value3 value4);
my $count   = @array;
my $integer = 0;

while ($integer lt $count) {
  print "Element $integer in \@array is $array[$integer] \n";
  ++$integer;
}

The following should be returned.

Element 0 in @array is "Orange"
Element 1 in @array is "Apple"
Element 2 in @array is "Peach"
Element 3 in @array is "Grape"

Math

Addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication can be used to adjust the count, like this.

my $count = @array + 1;

Or like this.

my $count = @array;
$count = $count + 1;