Dear Sirs, I have knuckled down and made some good ground work with the structure. I have managed to accept a given file name if certain values are met. I Have managed also to count the sentences but can i add the character count, paragraph count and word count from within the same WHILE loop and I am confused as to count paragraphs. Is there a code for carriage returns? 
#!/usr/bin/perl

if ($#ARGV == -1)
{
print("Please enter filename: ");
$filename = <STDIN>;
chomp ($filename);
}
else
{
 $filename = $ARGV[0];
}

if ($filename -r && $filename=~m/^[_a-zA-Z]/) #if filename is readable
+ AND matches.....
{
open (READFILE, $filename)|| die "Failed to open $filename: $!";
}

if ($filename !~ m/\.txt$/i) #if filename does not end with .txt then 
+add to filename
{
$filename .= ".TXT";
}

my $filecontents;
{
    local undef $/;
    $filecontents = <READFILE>;
}
close <READFILE>;  #slurps the whole file into a variable


$sentences = 0;
my @characters = $filecontents =~ m/./g;   # puts a copy of each match
+ into @characters
my($ch);
my $CharCount = scalar @characters;        # this counts the number of
+ elements in @characters
my @words = $filecontents =~m/[a-zA-Z]\s/g;# matches a char followed b
+y a white space character globally

while ($ch = getc(READFILE))
{
 # count sentences:
 if ($ch eq "?" || $ch eq "!" || $ch eq ".")
 # if character is one of the three end of sentence markers
 {
  $sentences++;
 }
}

while ($ch = getc(READFILE))
{
    $CharCount
        { $ch }++;
}



for (@characters)
 {
    print "There are $_ \n characters";
 }                                           
    print "There are $sentences sentences";                           
+                



# output data
# open(OUT, ">data1.txt") || die "data1.txt not open: $!";
# close(OUT);

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In reply to Re^2: Statistics from a txtfile by mbdc566021
in thread Statistics from a txtfile by mbdc566021

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