Almost everybody is probably willing to even help you with your coursework (a.k.a homework) if you first show us what you have tried yourself.

Few will probably be eager to wrtite your coursework for you though.

You get the point? Good! No? Read How (Not) To Ask A Question (especially "Do your own work") and then ask your question.

I'm trying to count the instances of certain characters within a text file. Here is what I have written so far. I'm having a problem with the brackets. Its picking them up as character classes. Help.

open (READFILE, "<readme.txt") || die "Couldn't open file: $!";
$buffer = "";

while(<READFILE>) {
    $commas++ while ($_ =~ m/,/g);
    $fullstops++ while ($_ =~ m/\./g);
    $openbracket++ while ($_ =~ m/[/g);
    $closedbracket++ while ($_ =~ m/]/g);
    $hypehns++ while ($_ =~ m/-/g);
}
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Escape them. See perlretut and perlre.

Regexes aren't good for counting anything. (Yes, there are regex hacks that count things, but we leave that aside for a moment...)

You should traverse your lines char by char and then check (perhaps with a regex, or with a hash lookup) if the char is interesting to you.

You want something like this:

my %hist;
while(<$fh>){
    ++$hist{ $_ } for split //;
}

for(sort{ $hist{ $b } <=> $hist{ $a } } keys %hist){
    print "'$_' => $hist{ $_ }\n";
}
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but you need to filter out the chars you don't want.

tr helps.

You may want to look at the responses to this post. I think your answer lurks in there =)

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Smoothie, smoothie, hundre prosent naturlig!