in reply to Statistics from a txtfile

you probably want a regexp more like 
/^[_a-zA-Z][^.]{1,7}\.txt$/

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This matches an underscore or letter (the {1} is unnecessary, char classes always match one char only, which is why you need modifiers like * or + to make it do something different)

Then you can do 

while(<READFILE>) { 
  # something here  
}

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which will go through the file line by line putting the data in $_
I would read up on chomp and split and regular expressions on how to work with the data in the file.

P.S. put <code> tags around your code to make it display properly in a post.

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Re^2: Statistics from a txtfile
by mbdc566021 (Initiate) on Jan 02, 2008 at 18:27 UTC
    Have read up on regex and still confused.Am i anywhere near correct with the variables? 
    #!/usr/bin/perl

print("Please enter filename: ");
$filename = <STDIN>;
chomp ($filename);

if ($filename=~m/^[_a-zA-Z][^.]{1,7}\.txt$/)
{
open (READFILE, $filename)|| die "Failed to open $filename: $!";
}
my $filecontents;
{
    local undef $/;
    $filecontents = <READFILE>;
}
close <READFILE>;  #slurps the whole file into variable

my @characters = $filecontents =~ m/./g;   # puts a copy of each match
+ into @characters
my $CharCount = scalar @characters;        # this counts the number of
+ elements in @characters
my @words = $filecontents =~m/\b\s/g;       # number of words
my @paragraph =($                          # number of paragraphs. wha
+t is code for new line char ie carriage return?
my @sentences = $filecontents=~m/\.$/g;    # number of sentences


for (@characters){
    print "$_ \n";
 }                                           # this will print a list 
+of each item counted:



# output data
# open(OUT, ">data1.txt") || die "data1.txt not open: $!";
# close(OUT);

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