Task — Count asterisks

You are given a string, $str, where every two consecutive vertical bars are grouped into a pair. Write a script to return the number of asterisks, *, excluding any between each pair of vertical bars.

Examples

Example 1
Input: $str = "p|*e*rl|w**e|*ekly|"
Output: 2
The characters we are looking for here are "p" 
   and "w**e".

Example 2
Input: $str = "perl"
Output: 0

Example 3
Input: $str = "th|ewe|e**|k|l***ych|alleng|e"
Output: 5
The characters we are looking for here are "th", 
   "e**", "l***ych" and "e"

Analysis

Again, there's probably a one-liner, but I simply:

• removed everything that matches |.*?|
• removed all characters which are not *

... which only leaves the countable asterisks, and the answer is therefore length($str).

Try it 

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Blog: http://ccgi.campbellsmiths.force9.co.uk/challenge

use v5.26;    # The Weekly Challenge - 2024-07-29
use utf8;     # Week 280 - task 2 - Count asterisks
use warnings; # Peter Campbell Smith
binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';

count_asterisks('p|*e*rl|w**e|*ekly|');
count_asterisks('perl');
count_asterisks('th|ewe|e**|k|l***ych|alleng|e');
count_asterisks('*****|*****|*****|*****|');

sub count_asterisks {
    
    my ($str);
    
    $str = shift @_;
    printf(qq[\nInput:  \@str = '%s'\n], $str);

    # remove |.*?| from $str
    $str =~ s/\|.*?\|//g;
    
    # remove non * from $str
    $str =~ s|[^\*]||g;
    
    printf(qq[Output: %s\n], length($str));
}

Output

Input:  @str = 'p|*e*rl|w**e|*ekly|'
Output: 2

Input:  @str = 'perl'
Output: 0

Input:  @str = 'th|ewe|e**|k|l***ych|alleng|e'
Output: 5

Input:  @str = '*****|*****|*****|*****|'
Output: 10