I'm fairly new to Perl, so this shouldn't be very hard to answer.

Anyway, I'm working on a function to return a hash with how often each word occurs in a text file. I have a regex for things that shouldn't be part of a word (such as whitespace and parentheses) to determine where a word ends and a new word starts. However, I found that when there's a line that has no text on it other than a newline, it adds the newline to the hash as it would with a word, and I have no idea how to fix this, nor if it's a problem with read or my regex. Here's my code:

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

sub readWords {
    ## Gets how many of each word are in a file and returns a hash

    my $file = shift;
    my %words = ();
    my $currentWord = "";

    # What characters to ignore
    my $blacklist = '[\s~`!@#\$%\^&\*\(\)\{\}\+=\\\/\[\]\.\,<>\?;:"]';

    open(my $FILE, "<", $file) or die("$0: $file: $!\n");
    while(!eof($FILE)) {
        while(read($FILE, my $letter, 1)) {
            if($letter !~ /$blacklist/) {
                $currentWord .= lc($letter);
            } else {
                last;
            }
        }
        if(!defined($words{$currentWord})) {
            $words{$currentWord} = 0;
        }
        $words{$currentWord}++;
        $currentWord = "";
    }
    close($FILE);
    return %words;
}

sub main() {
    my %words = readWords($ARGV[0]);
    my @keys = keys(%words);
    my @commonWord = ("", 0);

    foreach my $key (sort(@keys)) {
        if($words{$key} > $commonWord[1]) {
            @commonWord = ("$key", $words{$key});
        }
        print("$key: $words{$key}\n");
    }
    print("Number of unique words: " . scalar(@keys) . "\n");
    print("Most common word: $commonWord[0] - used $commonWord[1] time
+s\n");
}

main();
[download]

Thanks in advance if you decide to help.

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