Hi, when using for $i (@phrase), the variable $i becomes an alias for all the elements in the list @phrase. In the first run it contains "apple", then "apple" , then "banana" , etc.. If you have this construct, you don't need the additional counter $j. A bit shorter would be: 
 
for my $elem (@phrase) { 
    $wordfreq{$elem}++;
}

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# or even shorter, but perhaps a bit unreadable:
$wordfreq{$_} for (@phrase);

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 Update: Thanks to chargrill for pointing out my typo, indeed it should be: 
$wordfreq{$_}++ for (@phrase);

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When printing out the results you might want to print out the name of what you found, for example: 
foreach my $key (sort keys %wordfreq) {
    print "$key: $wordfreq{$key}\n";
}

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Hope this was the answer you were looking for. Cheers Roland

In reply to Re: Hash problem - Perl noob by rminner
in thread Hash problem - Perl noob by UncleTom

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