how-many to number?

[Albert Reiner <areiner@tph.tuwien.ac.at>]

Hi,

I am sure there must be a simple way to get the number of occurrences
of some regular expression in some region as a number.  However, the
only thing I could find was count-matches / how-many, but that only
prints a message in the minibuffer.

A trivial example:

    (how-many "\\b\\w+\\b" (point-min) (point-max))

returns a string like "88 occurrences", but how can I get at the
integer 88 instead?  I would then want to do some simple arithmetic on
it.

Thanks in advance,

Albert.