If you just want words, why bother with punctuation at all? Just do a massive s/\W+/ /g on the string beforehand and you'll get a big list of words, separated by spaces. I suppose those damn apostrophies will cause you pain, and you want "it's" to differ from "its". It's unclear whether or not capitalization matters-- is "BASIC" a different word from "basic"? What about "Smith" versus "smith"?

Anyway, I'd probably write something like this: 
local $/ = undef;
$_ = <MY_FILE>;
my %hash = ();
$hash{$_}++ foreach split /[^\w']+/; # Change $_ to lc if case matters

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-Ted

In reply to If you just want words... by tedv
in thread How can I use regex to copy each word of a string into a hash? by cei

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