I'm not going to solve this whole problem as it feels a bit too much like homework. But I could not resist a totally over engineered approach to solving the word count issue, by using a closure:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my $sentence = "Sam goes to school to play football";
my $word = substr($sentence,12,17-12+1);
my $next_word = substr($sentence,27,34-27+1);
my $find_word = word_counter($sentence);
print "$word: ", $find_word->($word),"\n";
print "$next_word: ", $find_word->($next_word),"\n";

sub word_counter {
    my $sentence = shift;
    my @words = split " ",$sentence;
    return sub {
        my $word = shift;
    my $count = 0;
    for (@words) {
        $count++;
        return $count if ( $word eq $_ );
    }
    return 0;
    }
}

[download]
The output is:

C:\Code>perl stuff1.pl
school: 4
football: 7

[download]

In reply to Re: character offset to word offset by dwm042
in thread character offset to word offset by newbio

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.