How to find the number of vowels in a string using Perl - perl

Question

sub Solution{
my $n=$_[0];
my $m=lc $_[1];
my #chars=split("",$m);
my $result=0;
my #vowels=("a","e","i","o","u");
#OUTPUT [uncomment & modify if required]
for(my $i=0;$i<$n;$i=$i+1){
for(my $j=0;$j<5;$j=$j+1){
if($chars[$i]==$vowels[$j]){
$result=$result+1;
last;
}
}
}
print $result;
}
#INPUT [uncomment & modify if required]
my $n=<STDIN>;chomp($n);
my $m=<STDIN>;chomp($m);
Solution($n,$m);
So I wrote this solution to find the number of vowels in a string. $n is the length of the string and $m is the string.
However, for the input 3 nam I always get the input as 3.
Can someone help me debug it?

Answer 1

== compares numbers. eq compares strings. So instead of $chars[$i]==$vowels[$j] you should write $chars[$i] eq $vowels[$j]. If you had used use warnings;, which is recommended, you'd have gotten a warning about that.
And by the way, there's no need to work with extra variables for the length. You can get the length of a string with length() and of an array for example with scalar(). Also, the last index of an array #a can be accessed with $#a. Or you can use foreach to iterate over all elements of an array.

Answer 2

A better solution is using a tr operator which, in scalar context, returns the number of replacements:
perl -le 'for ( #ARGV ) { $_ = lc $_; $n = tr/aeiouy//; print "$_: $n"; }' Use Perl to count how many vowels are in each string
use: 2
perl: 1
to: 1
count: 2
how: 1
many: 2
vowels: 2
are: 2
in: 1
each: 2
string: 1
I included also y, which is sometimes a vowel, see: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel

Answer 3

Let me suggest a better approach to count letters in a text
#!/usr/bin/env perl
#
# vim: ai:ts=4:sw=4
#
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';
use Data::Dumper;
my $debug = 0; # debug flag
my %count;
my #vowels = qw/a e i o u/;
map{
chomp;
my #chars = split '';
map{ $count{$_}++ } #chars;
} <DATA>;
say Dumper(\%count) if $debug;
foreach my $vowel (#vowels) {
say "$vowel: $count{$vowel}";
}
__DATA__
So I wrote this solution to find the number of vowels in a string. $n is the length of the string and $m is the string. However, for the input 3 nam I always get the input as 3.
Can someone help me debug it?
Output
a: 7
e: 18
i: 12
o: 12
u: 5

Answer 4

Your code is slightly modified form
#!/usr/bin/env perl
#
# vim: ai:ts=4:sw=4
#
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';
my $input = get_input('Please enter sentence:');
say "Counted vowels: " . solution($input);
sub get_input {
my $prompt = shift;
my $input;
say $prompt;
$input = <STDIN>;
chomp($input);
return $input;
}
sub solution{
my $str = lc shift;
my #chars=split('',$str);
my $count=0;
my #vowels=qw/a e i o u/;
map{
my $c=$_;
map{ $count++ if $c eq $_} #vowels;
} #chars;
return $count;
}