How to determine number of times a word appears in text? - regex

Question

How can I find the number of times a word is in a block of text in Perl?
For example my text file is this:
#! /usr/bin/perl -w
# The 'terrible' program - a poorly formatted 'oddeven'.
use constant HOWMANY => 4; $count = 0;
while ( $count < HOWMANY ) {
$count++;
if ( $count == 1 ) {
print "odd\n";
} elsif ( $count == 2 ) {
print "even\n";
} elsif ( $count == 3 ) {
print "odd\n";
} else { # at this point $count is four.
print "even\n";
}
}
I want to find the number of "count" word for that text file. File is named terrible.pl
Idealy it should use regex and with minimum number of line of code.
EDIT: This is what I have tried:
use IO::File;
my $fh = IO::File->new('terrible.pl', 'r') or die "$!\n";
my %words;
while (<$fh>) {
for my $word ($text =~ /count/g) {
print "x";
$words{$word}++;
}
}
print $words{$word};

Answer 1

Here's a complete solution. If this is homework, you learn more by explaining this to your teacher than by rolling your own:
perl -0777ne "print+(##=/count/g)+0" terrible.pl

Answer 2

If you are trying to count how many times appears the word "count", this will work:
my $count=0;
open(INPUT,"<terrible.pl");
while (<INPUT>) {
$count++ while ($_ =~ /count/g);
}
close(INPUT);
print "$count times\n";

Answer 3

I'm not actually sure what your example code is but you're almost there:
perl -e '$text = "lol wut foo wut bar wut"; $count = 0; $count++ while $text =~ /wut/g; print "$count\n";'
You can use the /g modifier to continue searching the string for matches. In the example above, it will return all instances of the word 'wut' in the $text var.

Answer 4

You can probably use something like so:
my $fh = IO::File->new('test.txt', 'r') or die "$!\n";
my %words;
while (<$fh>) {
for my $word (split / /) {
$words{$word}++;
}
}
That will give you an accurate count of every "word" (defined as a group of characters separated by a space), and store it in a hash which is keyed by the word with a value of the number of the word which was seen.

Answer 5

perdoc perlrequick has an answer. The term you want in that document is "scalar context".
Given that this appears to be a homework question, I'll point you at the documentation instead.

Answer 6

So, what are you trying to do? You want the number of times something appears in a block of text. You can use the Perl grep function. That will go through a block of text without needing to loop.
If you want an odd/even return value, you can use the modulo arithmetic function. You can do something like this:
if ($number % 2) {
print "$number is odd\n"; #Returns a "1" or true
}
else {
print "$number is even\n"; #Returns a "0" or false
}