All great suggestions - thanks!

If you have test input, you really ought to print out what you are getting as words and compare it to the input to see what special cases you may be missing.

I do indeed have test input that I have become quite intimate with while testing this script. This is how I discovered that nnn'n words were being skipped. I am digging thru the sample file, and I haven't found anything not getting picked up yet...but of course I probably have a lucky set of words in my file (a random text file from work)