@word_list{@words}=1;
@sorted = sort keys %word_list;
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update:
Oh come on, that shift+9 shift+0 ... 3 extra keys man ... *me*shakes*head* ... whatever happened to lazyness ???

:D

____________________________________________________
** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

Hmmm... I prefer to do     @word_list{@words} = (); since it doesn't make much sense (though it does work) to assign a scalar to an array slice.

jdporter
...porque es dificil estar guapo y blanco.

my @words = map {s/[.,!\W\?]\B//g; split; } <FILE>;
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It doesn't seem to me that you want to be altering any of the words; you're writing a pure filter. (Right?)

So I'd probably do this:

    my @words = 
        grep { /^[a-z]/i }
        map { split }
        <FILE>;
[download]

The map produces a list of all the "words" in the file; the grep filters out any that don't begin with a letter. If you need to remove punctuation and stuff like that (if you said you did, I missed that), then you could modify the split accordingly:         map { split /\W+/ } hth,

jdporter
...porque es dificil estar guapo y blanco.