Hi Monks!

I have a subroutine that essentially stores all of the text from files held in a specific folder into a hash (%corpus). The idea is that you specify the folder when you call the subroutine. This subroutine has been written and used by someone with a lot more coding experience than me, so I can be sure that it is not the problem.

What I want to do is 1) call the subroutine (getCorpus); 2) specify the folder that I want it to work on; 3) instruct it to store its output into a new hash (%mycorpus), and then I want to print out the contents of this hash.

I’ve been browsing the PerlMonk archives for any similar situations to see if I could solve the problem myself, and I’ve managed to cobble together the code below from various places (notably Re: easiest way to print the content of a hash?), but I am quite obviously making some big mistakes that I don't have the skills, as of yet, to spot (as evidenced by the various error messages it returns (reproduced below the code)

I haven't uploaded the original subroutine here because I'm not sure about the etiquette of making someone else's code available without their consent. But essentially the subroutine comes first and then I write: 

%mycorpus = getCorpus("C:\Users\li\test") #line 1
    foreach (sort keys %mycorpus) {
    print "$_ : $mycorpus{$_}\n";
  }

[download]

In line 1, I am trying to call the subroutine (named getCorpus), tell getCorpus what folder I want it to operate on, and store the output of the subroutine into a new hash named %mycorpus. Then in lines 2 and 3, I attempt to print the contents of %mycorpus. The error messages returned for this particular attempt are as follows: 

  Operator or semicolon missing before %mycorpus at get_corpus.pl line
+ 51.
Ambiguous use of % resolved as operator % at get_corpus.pl line 51.
Can't modify modulus (%) in scalar assignment at get_corpus.pl line 52
+, near ")
foreach "
syntax error at get_corpus.pl line 52, near ") {"
Execution of get_corpus.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

[download]
Any guidance on this would be greatly appreciated.

In reply to Storing output of a subroutine into an hash and then printing hash by Maire

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