I needed to count how many * characters were in a string, so I wrote this simple function.

sub char_count {
    my ($needle,$str) = @_;
    my $len = length($str);
    my $ret = 0;

    for (my $i = 0; $i < $len; $i++) {
        my $found = substr($str,$i,1);

        if ($needle eq $found) { $ret++; }
    }

    return $ret;
}

You can also write it using tr:

sub char_count {
    my ($needle,$haystack) = @_;
    my  $count = $haystack =~ tr/$needle//;

    return $count;
}