Hello, everyone. I'm a beginner at Perl and programming in general, so apologies if the answer to this question seems obvious to you all.

I'm trying store each word from a txt file as an element in an array, join the elements using a dash, and print the joined string so I can check whether everything was split in the right places (so if there's a dash where I wanted the file to be split, then I know things worked properly).

This was mostly working except that it wouldn't split at newlines, and a little googling told me I might be in over my head trying to fix that, so instead I put the text of the file into a site that removed the newlines for me and then pasted the newline-free text into my txt file. After doing that, suddenly my array only had the first element, which I set as the word NULL instead of pulling it from the text, and nothing else.

Here's the relevant part of my code:

 
my $in=<STDIN>;
my @words;
my $joined;

$words[0] = 'NULL';

while(my $line = <STDIN>){
  @words = grep { /\S/ } split  /[:.,\s]/, $line;
  my $joined = join("-", @words);
  print "$joined\n";
}

[download]

I assume something about the text I copied from the newline-removing site made it unreadable...? The original text with the newlines was copied from a website as well, but it works fine.

Basically: What might be the difference between the two texts? Is there anything I can do to get both versions of the text to work?

In reply to Can read one txt file and not another? by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.