I am a reading a text file (Alice in Wonderland), parsing each line in a primitive way, trying to print the most common "word" using a hash.
I could do it by iterating through the keys, but instead I am trying to keep track each time I catch a word.
My program prints as shown below.
("ALICE'S" is the first word in the file; I would expect the screen to be full of the rest of the words too.)

C:\scripts>wordcount.pl alice.txt
ALICE'Sdistinct words: 4007
frequency of most common word: 5160
common word:

use strict;

my $maxcount;
my $find;

sub read_line {
  our %hash;

  my @list = split /[,.?!)"]?\s\)?/, shift;
  my $count;
  foreach my $word (@list) {
    $hash{lc $word}++;
    $count =$hash{lc $word};
    if ($count > $maxcount) {
      print "$word";
      $maxcount++;
      $find = $word;
    }
  }
}

sub read_file{
  my $file=shift;
  open (FILE, $file) or die "couldn't open $file: $!";
  while (my $line = <FILE>) {
    read_line $line;
  }
}
read_file @ARGV;

my $numwords= keys our %hash;
print "distinct words: $numwords\n";
print "frequency of most common word: $maxcount\n";
print "common word: $find";

[download]

In reply to using hash to find frequency count by jjohhn

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.