Question

Suppose there is a text like this:

|-SAMPLE-D2
|---SAMPLE-D1
|---SAMPLE3

I want to count the number of “-” after |.
I tried to parse that by using the following regular expression in perl

$count=()= /-/g;

but this is problematic because the first two has “-” somewhere else in the text as well as in the front. How should I form my regex or use other function in perl to get the number of “-” right after “|”?

Answer 1

Regex to match the dashes after the starting |:
/^\|([\-]*)/