in reply to Golf: Improve this guy's fail . . . please!

This looks embarrassingly similar to my first Perl scripts, except that I never called subroutines with a leading & because I had the luck to learn Perl 5 from the start ;-).

It's a typical case of not knowing about autovivification: instead of assigning 0 to every possible hash key, and later sort out those which remained 0, you can simply leave out both steps altogether.

It is also typical in confusing ASCII with an 8-bit encoding.

A non-golfed version: 

use strict;
use warnings;
use List::Util qw(sum);

my %chars;
local $/ = \1;
while (<>) {
    $chars{$_}++ if /\w/;
}

my $total = sum values %chars;
print "key\tcount\t%\n";
for (sort keys %chars) {
    printf "%s\t%d\t%.3f\n", $_, $chars{$_}, $chars{$_} / $total; 
}

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It doesn't prompt for a filename, instead it either expects a file name on the command line, or reads from STDIN - in good old unix tradition.

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Re^2: Golf: Improve this guy's fail . . . please!
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jun 30, 2009 at 22:44 UTC

    At the opposite end of the spectrum, reading in the whole file: 

    local $/;
++$chars{$_} for <> =~ /\w/g

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    (Trimmed: local$/;++$c{$_}for<>=~/\w/g)

    It only accepts one file, though.

    Update: 5 shorter, accepts multiple files, and doesn't mess with $/: 

    ++$chars{$_} for map /\w/g, <>

    [download]

    (Trimmed: ++$c{$_}for map/\w/g,<>)

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[d/l]
[select]
      I borrowed your idea and made something short and very ugly which does the whole job including percentages and total. I even added a count of distinct characters: 
      ++$t,++$c{$_}for map/\w/g,<>;
print$_,"\t",$c{$_},"\t",$c{$_}/$t*100,$/for sort keys %c;
print"Distinct: ".keys(%c)."\tTotal: $t\n";

      [download]

      I doubt I'd call that an "improvement", at least with a straight face. It could be cleaned up pretty easily, though.

[reply]
[d/l]
        It could be cleaned up pretty easily, though.

        Then do it! No good leaving lousy code floating around... ;-)

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