Word Frequency Script

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Hello Perl community,

I am trying to get a simple program working that will count the words in a
text file and put them in a hash with the key being the word and the value
being its frequency in the text file. Here is my code:

---

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

{

open IN, "
my %word_count;
my @input_file = ;

foreach (@input_file){

my @x = split;


foreach (@x){


$word_count{$_}++;

}
}

foreach (%word_count){
print "$word_count{$_}\n\n";
}
}
---

The problem is on the 3rd to last line I get this error when I run it:

Use of uninitialized value within %word_count in concatenation (.) or string
at perl.pl line 26, line 520.

I don't understand why any value would be unintialized in that hash as the
loops previous should have taken care of all the initializing and word
counts. If I remove the last foreach loop and just put a common word for
ex.: print "$word_count{the}\n" I get the count for that word.

Thanks,

Jon

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Re: Word Frequency Script

On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 11:30, Jon Forsyth wrote:

This part:

> foreach (%word_count){
> print "$word_count{$_}\n\n";
>  }

You want to write like this:

foreach my $key ( keys %word_count ) {
print "$word_count{$key}\n\n";
}

What you've got above is getting both keys *and* values from the hash,
and you're getting that error when values are used as keys in the
lookup.

chrs,
john.

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Re: Word Frequency Script

On 08/06/2011 16:30, Jon Forsyth wrote:
> Hello Perl community,

Hey Jon

> I am trying to get a simple program working that will count the words in a
> text file and put them in a hash with the key being the word and the value
> being its frequency in the text file. Here is my code:
>
> ---
>
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> use strict;
> use warnings;

Well done. Those two lines work magic.

> {

This will work fine, but enclosing your code in a block as you would in
C or Java is unnecessary. The source file as a whole constitutes a code
block for the purposes of scoping, and you will make Perl programmers
feel more at home if you drop the braces.

> open IN, "
Whatever your books may say, best practice is to use lexical file
handles and the three-argument form of open. So this line would become

open my $in, '<', 'file.txt' or die "cannot open file: $!";

> my %word_count;
> my @input_file =;
>
> foreach (@input_file){

Reading the file one line at a time, there is no need for @input_file,
and your loop becomes just

while (<$in>) {


> my @x = split;
>
>
> foreach (@x){
> $word_count{$_}++;
>
> }

Trivially, there is no need for @x here (and in any case it deserves a
better name!) so you could write

$word_count{$_}++ foreach split;

> }
>
> foreach (%word_count){

> print "$word_count{$_}\n\n";
> }
> }
> ---
>
> The problem is on the 3rd to last line I get this error when I run it:
>
> Use of uninitialized value within %word_count in concatenation (.) or string
> at perl.pl line 26, line 520.
>
> I don't understand why any value would be unintialized in that hash as the
> loops previous should have taken care of all the initializing and word
> counts. If I remove the last foreach loop and just put a common word for
> ex.: print "$word_count{the}\n" I get the count for that word.

While you can 'foreach' over an entire hash, you will be iterating over
(key, value, key, value ...) alternately in the body of the loop. The
errors come from the times when $_ holds a hash value instead of a key.
Since there is no corresponding hash entry, $word_count{$_} does not
exist and is reported as being uninitialized.

What you wanted here was

foreach (keys %word_count) {
print "$word_count{$_}\n";
}

but I recommend that you use the built-in library Data::Dumper to
examine data structures for debugging. Just write

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper \%word_count;

and you will see the hash that you have built.

Cheers,

Rob



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