Hi there, I have the following script. 
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $candidate = 'the the the the the the the';
my @candidate_words = split (/\W/, $candidate);
my $candidate_count=@candidate_words;
my %candidate = ();
map { $candidate{$_}++ } @candidate_words;

my $reference = 'the cat is the on the mat';
my @reference_words = split (/\W/, $reference);
my %reference = ();
map { $reference{$_}++ } @reference_words;

while((my $key, my $val)=each(%candidate)){
print $key."->".$val."\n";
}

print "-------------------------------------\n";

while((my $key, my $val)=each(%reference)){
print $key."->".$val."\n";
}

[download]

This scripts i m writing to find similarity between two sentences. The two sentences are stored in $candidate and $reference variables.

In the current script i made the program to count the occurence of each type of word and stored them in a hash.. Now,each hash has the words and its count from both candidate and reference sentences.

The help in need is, i want to take each words in the candidate and compare that with the two hashes to find the maximum reference count. for eg. if i have the word called "the" in candidate,i want to find the count of this word in %candidate hash as well as %reference hash and i want to take the minimum values(i.e if 2 and 5 is the count of "the" in two hashes i want 2.) out of this two counts. likewise for all words in the candidate.. Plz help me in this.. thanks

In reply to hash comparison by sarvan

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