in reply to tutelage needed

Are you familiar with Perl hashes? They are very helpful for questions like this. With them, a string indexes a scalar chunk of data. That can be applied to a wordcount by just incrementing the value keyed by each word you see. After that, sort can be told to pick out the keys with the highest values, and grep to filter out short ones (or else don't add them to the hash in the first place).

Your split doesn't do exactly what you want, it will split "want, it" into three, with a zero length 'word' from between the comma and the space. You may want to replace the space in your character class with \s, add more punctuation, and allow it to repeat with the + quantifier.

Check out the length function.

What is unexpected about the behavior of apostrophes?

After Compline,
Zaxo

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Re: Re: tutelage needed
by ctp (Beadle) on Jan 01, 2004 at 03:16 UTC
    Are you familiar with Perl hashes?

    getting there

    That can be applied to a wordcount by just incrementing the value keyed by each word you see

    I planned on needing to use a hash here, but it was the creation and filling of that hash that had me stuck...actually it was just the filling of it, they're pretty easy to create :)

    Your split doesn't do exactly what you want

    ah...good suggestions, I'll go try them out

    Check out the length function.

    I did earlier in my attempts, but I didn't get very usable results. It told me every word was 1 byte long regardless of actual length. Probably not using it right.

    What is unexpected about the behavior of apostrophes?

    well, I consider a word like dog's, or cat's a 4 letter word, but my script doesn't seem to.

[reply]
      well, I consider a word like dog's, or cat's a 4 letter word, but my script doesn't seem to

      Nope, it sure doesn't. Consider your code that picks out the 4 letter words: 

      push @gt_three_char_words, $_ if /[a-zA-Z]{4,}/;

      [download]

      What types of characters "count" when they're counted this way?

      Gary Blackburn
      Trained Killer

[reply]
[d/l]
        What types of characters "count" when they're counted this way?

        another AHA! moment...thanks!
[reply]

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