Something which none of the other solutions posted here so far takes into account, is words with internal apostrophes. (don't won't, can't shouldn't, you'll, it's, etc.) And most don't deal with non-ascii characters.

This does:

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

my $word = qr/(?<!\p{Alnum})\p{Alnum}+(?!\p{Alnum})/;
my %count;

while (<DATA>) {
    my $line = lc $_;
    while ($line =~ /($word('$word)?)/g){
        $count{$1}++;
    }
}

printf "%15s %5d\n", $_, $count{$_} for sort keys %count;

__DATA__
"Hello World!"
"Oh poor Yorick, his world I knew well yes I did"
"don't won't, can't shouldn't, you'll, it's, etc."
"Señor Montóya's resüme isn't ápropos."
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That reply is a very good solution. Noted the use of the character class to eliminate possible counting alpha numeric words such as this123, which I did not explicitly specify how they should be handled in my original post.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper qw( Dumper );

my $string = "Hello World!\n  Oh poor Yorick, his world I knew well ye
+s I did";

# No change up to here
# then just

map ++$_,@count{split /\W+/,uc $string};

# that's it
print "Word count:  ", Dumper(%count);

1;
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my %counts;
while (<>) {
  $counts{$_}++ for split;
}
print "$_: $counts{$_}\n" for sort keys %counts;
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That leaves all the punctuation and other non-word characters and will tamper the results. (e.g. counting "word" and "word," as two different entities.)


holli, /regexed monk/

True, and it also doesn't account for capitalisation. It does give the same results as the OP's code. - update: I just noticed it didn't :-)
"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

how about this then? it splits on any non-word character, and takes acount for case.

my %counts;
while (<>) {
  $counts{ lc $_ }++ for split /\W+/;
}
print "$_: $counts{$_}\n" for sort keys %counts;
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$str='Hello World!\n  Oh poor Yorick, his world I knew well yes I did'
+;

$n=$str=~s#\w+#$&#gsi;
print $n;

or

@n=$str=~m#\w+#gsi;
print scalar(@n);
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print "$_ = $count{$_}\n" for sort { $count{$b} <=> $count{$a} } grep 
+/\w/, map { lc $_ if (!$count{lc $_}++) } split( /[\W_]/  , join (' '
+, <>));
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#!/usr/bin/env perl
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use strict;
use warnings;
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use Data::Dumper qw( Dumper );

my $string = "Hello World!\n  Oh poor Yorick, his world I knew well ye
+s I did";

my @words = split( /\W+/, $string);
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my @words = /\w+/g;
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<SNIP>

print "Word count:  ", Dumper(%count);

1;
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All in all, well done!

Well, no harm done, but split is for... ehm... splitting.

This usage of split is perfectly valid and appropriate.

my @words = /\w+/g;

Shouldn't that be @words =~ /\w+/g; ?

Which of them is faster depends on the data.


holli, /regexed monk/

If you're talking about a plain text document:

print `wc -w /path/to/file.txt`;
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cLive ;-)

my @words = /\w+/g;
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Shouldn't that be @words =~ /\w+/g; ?

No. But indeed it is implictly assuming that the string to be matched is in $_ which is where it usually is in my code, but which is not the case for the OP's example, actually. But the cure is really lightweight, however:

@words = $string =~ /\w+/g;
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Which of them is faster depends on the data.

Please note that I didn't speak of speed. I was talking about the conceptual terseness of the concept of saying what it is that you want as opposed to that of saying what it is that is not among the stuff that you do not want.

...
my $counter;

$counter++ while $string =~ /\w+/g;

print "Word count: $counter\n";
...
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     #!/usr/bin/awk -f
     # wordfreq.awk --- print list of word frequencies
     {
         $0 = tolower($0)    # remove case distinctions
         # remove punctuation
         gsub(/[^[:alnum:]_[:blank:]]/, "", $0)
         for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++)
             freq[$i]++
     }
     
     END {
         for (word in freq)
             printf "%s\t%d\n", word, freq[word]
     }
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I did this in Wordcounting with DBM files - can't open file?

HTH.

Hi try this

my $string = "Hello World!\n  Oh poor Yorick, his world I knew well ye
+s I did";
($err) = $string =~ s#(\w+)#$1#g;
print $err;
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Update: Using undef $/, you read all the text in one scalar and only word you replace by word and store in the variable. You may get the total count of the word of the document.

Regards,