sub count_t {
        local ($string) = @_;

      # There are a couple of tricks you can use to do this.
      # This one splits the string into words using "t" as
      # the split pattern. The number of occurrences of "t"
      # is one less than the number of words resulting from
      # the split.
        @dummy = split(/t/, $string);
        $retval = @dummy - 1;
}
