Perl split function basics reading each word from an input file - perl

Question

I'm having trouble understanding why this code will not output anything:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my %allwords = (); #Create an empty hash list.
my $running_total = 0;
while (<>) {
print "In the loop 1";
chomp;
print "Got here";
my #words = split(/\W+/,$_);
}
foreach my $val (my #words) {
print "$val\n";
}
And I run it from the terminal using the command:
perl wordfinder.pl < exampletext.txt
I would expect the code above to output each word from the input file, but it does not output anything other than "In the loop 1" and "Got here". I'm trying to separate the input file word by word, using the split parameter I specified.
Update 1: Here, I have declared the variables within their proper scope, which was my main issue. Now I am getting all of the words from the input file to output on the terminal:
my %allwords = (); #Create an empty hash list.
my $running_total = 0;
my #words = ();
my $val;
while (<>) {
print "Inputting words into an array! \n";
chomp;
#words = split(/\W+/,$_);
}
print("Words have been input successfully, performing analysis: \n");
foreach $val (#words) {
print "$val\n";
}
UPDATE 2: Progress has been made. Now, we put all words from any input files into a hash, and then print each unique key (i.e. each unique word found across all input files) from the hash.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
# Description: We want to take ALL text files from the command line input and calculate
# the frequencies of the words contained therein.
# Step 1: Loop over all words in all input files, and put each new unique word in a
# hash (check to see if contained in hash, if not, put the word in; if the word already
# exists in the hash, then increase its "total" by 1). Also, keep a running total of
# all words.
print("Welcome to word frequency finder. \n");
my $running_total = 0;
my %words;
my $val;
while (<>) {
chomp;
foreach my $str (split(/\W+/,$_)) {
$words{$str}++;
$running_total++;
}
}
print("Words have been input successfully, performing analysis: \n");
# Step 2: Loop over all entries in the hash and look for the word (key) with the
# maximum amount, and then remove this from the hash and put in a separate list.
# Do this until the size of the separate list is 10, since we want the top 10 words.
foreach $val (keys %words) {
print "$val\n";
}

Answer 1

Since you've already completed step 1, you're left with getting your top ten most common words. Rather than looping through the hash and finding the most frequent entry, let's let Perl do the work for us by sorting the hash by its values.
To sort the %words hash by its keys, we can use the expression sort keys %words; to sort a hash by its values, but be able to access its keys, we need a more complex expression:
sort { $words{$a} <=> $words{$a} } keys %words
Breaking it down, to sort numerically, we use the expression
sort { $a <=> $b } #array
(see [perl sort][1] for more on the special variables $a and $b used in sorting)
sort { $a <=> $b } keys %words
would sort on the hash keys, so to sort on the values, we do
sort { $words{$a} <=> $words{$b} } keys %words
Note that the output is still the keys of the hash %words.
We actually want to sort from high to low, so swap $a and $b over to reverse the sort direction:
sort { $words{$b} <=> $words{$a} } keys %words
Since we're compiling a top ten list, we only want the first ten from our hash. It's possible to do this by taking a slice of the hash, but the easiest way is just to use an accumulator to keep count of how many entries we have in the top ten:
my %top_ten;
my $i = 0;
for (sort { $words{$b} <=> $words{$a} } keys %words) {
# $_ is the current hash key
$top_ten{$_} = $words{$_};
$i++;
last if $i == 10;
}
And we're done!