Re: Counting words

Here is a regex way to grab the first x words for each line (in my example x=4).

use strict;

open (IN,"<in.txt") or die $!;
while (<IN>) {
    print "$1\n" if (/^\s*((?:[^\s]+\s+){4})/);
}
close(IN);
[download]

-jbWare

Comment on Re: Counting words Download Code

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Re^2: Counting words by zdog (Priest) on Sep 13, 2004 at 15:26 UTC
I modified your code a little to fit the problem description slightly better: `use strict; my $num_words = 4; my @words = (); open FILE, "<in.txt" or die $!; while ( <FILE> ) { last if ( push ( @words, m/\s([^\s]+)\s/g ) >= $num_words ); } close FILE; print join( " ", @words ) . "\n";` [download] As a side note, is there a reason to use `[^\s]` rather than `\S`, or is it just a matter of preference? Thanks. Zenon Zabinski \| zdog \| zdog@perlmonk.org	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Counting words by jbware (Chaplain) on Sep 13, 2004 at 15:49 UTC
Yeah, "last if" is a good call, I wasn't thinking. The OP wasn't clear exactly how they wanted the results back (string or array of words), so I choose string. Nice convert to array though. As far as `[^\s]` versus `\S`, force of habit. If my laziness virtue would kick in like its supposed to, I'd have switched to \S by now and saved some keystrokes :) -jbWare	[reply] [d/l] [select]