WE regret that a press of matter prevents our noticing #### Found for, 1 times. Found such, 1 times. Found up, 1 times. Found at, 2 times. Found had, 1 times. Found was, 1 times. Cumulative total of all words found: 50 #### #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my %histogram = map { $_ => 0 } qw( a am an and are as at be been but by can co de do due each ); # hash of the words to find so we can do an O(1) lookup for them while ( <> ) { chomp; for ( split ) { # split returns a list we can use directly tr/A-Z/a-z/; # lowercase all input print "$_\n"; $histogram{ $_ }++ if exists $histogram{ $_ }; # only store counts for words that matter } } my $count=0; foreach my $word ( keys %histogram ) { # keys() will list the keys, and we've already taken care # of making sure we don't have extra words stored. # Now there's no need to do two loops and check an array # against a hash. if ($histogram{$word} >0) { print "Found $word, $histogram{$word} times.\n"; $count = $count + $histogram{$word}; } } print "Cumulative total of all words found: $count\n";