in reply to Count words on a website

This is actually a (potentially) very complicated thing. What I would do is the following:
  1. Define the problem better. Are you going to do just static pages? What defines if a page is in a given site? There are a lot of different answers, and none are really wrong.
  2. Learn how to do the part where they enter a the URL (and word?) and figure out how you can do something with it.
  3. Learn how to return information back to them.
  4. Then, and only then, are you ready to learn how to walk a website (probably using something similar to WWW::Mechanize).

In other words, I would recommend the following:

  1. Read Learning Perl, by Randal Schwartz.
  2. Play around with website development

I hope your homework isn't due in the next week, or so.

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Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.