Hi there, I just wanted to know whether there was an easy way of checking the number of white space separated columns or words in a provided string (scalar) without turning it into an array

for example if I have a string like this

Code:

$string="a b c d 6";

obviously if i was using an array i could do something like

Code:

my $count = @array;

Is there a simple way of counting these in a scalar?