in reply to punctuation search... using ascii

My guess is that you're not clearing the %wordHash hash for each line of the file. 
while (<DATA>) {
  my %wordHash;

  ...
}

[download]
should do the trick, I think.
Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom