The following is a version of the code above reworked to be a little more Perlish and to allow generation by minimum word count and minimum sentence count. Examine the while loop to see how this works. Note too the commented out line following the comment "Translate spaces to newlines" - guess what happens if you uncomment that!

use strict;
use warnings;

# based on original code written by Ron Starr in May 2000

my $MAXLETTERS = 1000;
my $GRAIN = 3;
my $LETTERS_LINE = 70;

my @textletters;

while(<DATA>) {
    # pull in the text, break it into letters, put in letter array
    chomp;
    my $text = $_ . " ";

    # regularize whitespace in order to split text into letters
    $text =~ s/^\s+//g; # remove leading blanks    
    $text =~ s/\s+/ /g; # convert any whitespace to blanks
    $text =~ s/ +/ /g;  # eliminate any multiple blanks...
    push @textletters, split (//, $text); # split text into letters

}

# generate the frequency table
my $loopmax = $#textletters - ($GRAIN - 2) - 1; # calculate outer loop
+ limits
my %frequency_table;

for my $j (0 .. $loopmax - 1) {
    # go through all lists of $GRAIN letters in the text
    my $key_string = "";

    # build the key string (GRAIN - 1) letters
    $key_string .= $textletters[$_] for $j .. $j + $GRAIN - 1;

    $frequency_table{$key_string} .= $textletters[$j + $GRAIN];
}

# generate the travesty
my @lastletters;
my $wordCount = 0;
my $sentenceCount = 0;

# start with a seed of the first $GRAIN letters from the text
push @lastletters, @textletters[0 .. $GRAIN - 1];
my $line = join '', @textletters[0 .. $GRAIN - 1];

# now, do the actual generation
while ($wordCount < 20 or $sentenceCount < 2) {
    # see if the current last letters are in the table
    my $key_string = ""; # construct the key string from the lastlette
+rs
    
    $key_string .= join '', @lastletters[0 .. $GRAIN - 1];

    if ( exists $frequency_table{$key_string} ) {
        # we have possible letters
        # split the list of letters that follow the key string
        my @possible = split "", $frequency_table{$key_string};

        # select the next letter
        my $nextletter = $possible[rand @possible];
       
        # adjust the lastletters array
        @lastletters[0 .. $GRAIN - 2] = @lastletters[1 .. $GRAIN - 1];
        $lastletters[$GRAIN - 1] = $nextletter;
        
        ++$wordCount if $nextletter eq ' ';
        
        # Translate spaces to newlines
        #$nextletter = "\n" if $nextletter = ' ';
        
        # add letter to buffer and dump buffer if ready for output
        $line .= $nextletter;
        ++$sentenceCount if $line =~ /\.[\n ]$/;

        if(length ($line) > $LETTERS_LINE && $line =~ /[ .]$/) {
            print "$line\n";
            $line = '';
        }

    } else {
        # we drew a blank
        # re-seed the generation with the first $GRAIN letters from th
+e text
        @lastletters = @textletters[0 .. $GRAIN - 1];
        $line = join '', @textletters[0 .. $GRAIN - 1];
    }
}

print "$line\n" if length $line;

__DATA__
After much searching I was able to locate a character-level Markov tex
+t
generator: http://www.eskimo.com/~rstarr/poormfa/travesty2.html Howeve
+r, this
program terminates once it has reached a certain number of characters.
+ My
knowledge of Perl is very limited (the concept of hashes escapes me co
+mpletely),
but I think what I need changed is relatively simple. How would this p
+rogram be
modified so that each word generated is printed on its own line (ie. w
+ords are
separated by \n instead of ' ') and it terminates after generating a c
+ertain
number of words, rather than characters?
[download]

Prints some variant on:

After generated is relatively), but I need (the com/~rstarr/poormfa/tr
+avesty2.
html Howevery line (ie. How words able to located a characterminates m
+e 
com/~rstarr/poormfa/travesty2.html How word generating a charate a cer
+tain 
number that I need once its on its on instead of Perl is program be mo
+dified 
on its own line (ie.
[download]