A simple approach would be to build two hashes from the strings, and then compare the hashes.

So you might do something like:

my %foo;
my $string = 'Poet Blake had a milky white cat. He used to call it Pus
+sy.';
for my $word (split /\s+/, $string) {
   $foo{$word}++;
}
[download]

You do the same for the second string, and then to compare you simply iterate through one of the hashes and increment a counter if each word is present in the other hash. Something like so:

my $cnt;
for my $word (keys %foo) {
    $cnt++ if $bar{$word};
}
[download]

To find the total number of words in either string, you simply count the number of keys in the hash, e.g.

my $word_count = scalar keys %foo;
[download]

And then it's just a simple calculation.
Obvious question is how does your calculation look if the two strings contain a different number of words? But I'm sure you can decide that.

hope this helps,
Darren

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.