Counting occurance of the word "the" giving me all different answers - perl

Question

So I have a simple script to read in a text file from the command line, and I want to count the number of "the"s but I've been getting weird numbers.
while(<>){
$wordcount= split(/\bthe\b/, $_);}
print "\"the\" occurs $wordcount times in $ARGV";
So using that I get 10 occurrences, but if I use /\bthe\b/i I get 12. /\Bthe\b/ gives me 6 I believe. There are 11 occurrences in my test txt. Am I just an idiot? Should $wordcount just be started at 1 or 0? Also is it bad practice to use split this way? The code works fine for actually counting the words, but not when counting an exact string. New to perl so any and all abuse is appreciated. Thanks
Edit: also I know it's not adding, but now I get that $wordcount is being treated more like an array, so it worked for a previous iteration, though it was definitely poor form.

Answer 1

Use a regex in a list context to pull the count of matches:
my $wordcount = 0;
while (<>) {
$wordcount += () = /\bthe\b/g;
}
print qq{"the" occurs $wordcount times in $ARGV\n};
Reference: perlfaq4 - How can I count the number of occurrences of a substring within a string?

Answer 2

split splits the string into a list based on the regex provided. Your count comes from the fact you've put split in scalar context. From perldoc -f split:
split Splits the string EXPR into a list of strings and returns the
list in list context, or the size of the list in scalar context.
Given the string "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" I'd expect your $wordcount to be 2, which would be correct.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
^^^============================^^^========= -> two fields
However if you had "A bird and the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" you'd end up with 3 which is not correct.
A bird and the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
===========^^^============================^^^========= -> three fields
First of all you absolutely would want \b as that matches a word boundary. \B matches things that aren't word boundaries so you'd be matching any word that contained "the" instead of the word "the".
Secondly you just want to count the occurrences - you do that by counting the matches of the entire string
$wordcount = () = $string =~ /\bthe\b/gi
$wordcount becomes the list in scalar context, () is a list you aren't actually capturing since you don't want the matches. $string is the string to match against. You're matching "the" at word boundaries and gi is the whole string (global), case insensitive.

Answer 3

With the /i flag, 'The' would be included, but not without it.
\B is a non-word boundary, so would only find things like "clothe", and not "the".
Yes, it is bad practice to use split that way. Properly, if you just want a count, do this:
$wordcount = () = split ...;
split in scalar context does something that seemed like a good idea originally, but doesn't seem so good anymore, so avoid it. The above incantation calls it in list context but assigns the number of elements found to $wordcount.
But the elements produced by splitting on the aren't what you want; you want a count of times the was found. So do (possibly with /ig instead of just /g):
$wordcount = () = /\bthe\b/g;
Note that you probably want +=, not =, to get a total for all lines.

Answer 4

sample.txt
Ajith
kumar
Ajith
my name is Ajith and Ajith
lastname is kumar
code
use Data::Dumper;
print "Enter your string = ";
my $input = <>; ## User input
chomp $input; ## The chomp() function will remove (usually) any newline character from the end of a string
my %count;
open FILE, "<sample.txt" or die $!; ## To read the data from a file
my #data = <FILE>;
for my $d (#data) {
my #array = split ('\s', $d); ##To split the more than one word in a line
for my $a (#array) {
$count{$a}++; ## Counter
}
}
print Dumper "Result: " . $count{$input};
The above code get the input vai command prompt, then search the word into the given text file "sample.txt", then display the output how many times it appears in the text file (sample.txt)
Note: User Input must be in "Case sensitive ".
INTPUT from the USER
Enter your string = Ajith
OUTPUT
$VAR1 = 'Result: 4';

Answer 5

print "Enter the string: ";
chomp($string = <>);
die "Error opening file" unless(open(fil,"filename.txt"));
my #file = <fil>;
my #mt;
foreach (#file){
#s = map split,$_;
push(#mt,#s);
}
$s = grep {m/$string/gi} #mt;
print "Total no., of $string is:: $s\n";
In this give the output what you expect.