Perl regex - How to make it less greedy?

Question

How do I count the number of empty 'fields' in the following string ? Empty fields are indicated by -| or |-| or |- The regex I have cooked up seems to be working except when I have consecutive empty fields ? How do I make it less greedy ?

my $string = 'P|CHNA|string-string|-|-|25.75|-|2562000|-0.06';
my $count = () = ($string=~/(?:^-\||\|-$|\|-\|)/g);   
printf("$count\n");

The above code prints 2 instead of 3 which I want.

Answer 1

I'd avoid the regex route entirely for this and instead treat this like a list, because it is one:

my $count = grep { /^-$/ } split /\|/, $string;