As far as I understand it, for a character to be common to all words being scanned, it has to occur at least once in each word. If @ARGV contains 3 words to be scanned, for example, then we are only interested in characters than occur a minimum of once per word for all three words, or three times. That's why when a character is found in a given word for the first time, it's "score" is incremented by 1 to bring the cumulative score to the word number +1 (since arrays start at 0). Other occurences of the same character in the same word are effectively ignored since we don't care. Only characters that score 3 are returned. I think this theory does satisfy the original requirements actually, even if the code itself is buggy...

---

---

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.