So I am trying to create a subroutine that either returns an array or a hash. The purpose is so then I can have a feature array and store the array into a hash table that keeps track of how many times the word repeats. It supposed to simulate a bag-of-words. This is what I have so far. 
sub getFeatures {
    my @tokens = split /\s+/, $_[0];
    return @tokens;
}

if($currentSentence =~ /<@> <s> ([\S\s]+) <head>lines?<\/head> ([\S\s]
++) <\/s> <@>/)
{
    my @temp = getFeatures("$1 $2");
    foreach my $variable (@temp) { 
            $features{$variable} ++;
    } 
}

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$currentSenctence is predefined.

In reply to assign array to hash by lobs

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