Problems with user arguments in Perl - perl

Question

I'm currently trying to take user arguments (usually 2) that are text files, get the amount of characters, lines, and words from the text file and display them back. My code currently adds them all together instead of listing them separately for each file. How do I list the file name based on user arguments, and the amount of lines, characters and words for each file without adding them together? Thank you for taking time to read this.
#!usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $user_files = #ARGV;
chomp($user_files);
my #parts;
my $word_count = 0;
my $total_words = 0;
my $line_count = 0;
foreach my $line (<>)
{
#parts = split (/\s+/,$line);
$line_count += (line =~tr/\n//);
$word_count += length($line) + 1;
$total_words += scalar(#parts);
}
for(my $i = 0; $i < 1; $i++)
{
print "File name:", #ARGV,
"\t\t Word Count: ", $word_count,
"\t\t Total words: ", $total_words,
"\t\t Total lines: ", $line_count,
"\n";
}

Answer 1

There are two basic things you need to change to enable this to work.
Use $ARGV - when reading across multiple files using <>, it contains the name of the current file
Store the data in a hash (that is keyed on $ARGV)
In this sample, I've retained all of your calculations (but I think you'll need to reconsider some of those) and made a few other changes to clean up your code a bit.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings; # better than '-w'
my %files; # Store all the data here
# While is better than foreach here as is reads the file one line at a time.
# Each line goes into $_
while (<>) {
# By default, split splits $_ on whitespace
my #parts = split;
# By default, tr/// works on $_
$files{$ARGV}{line_count} += tr/\n//;
# I think this calculation is wrong.
# length() has no relation to word count. And why add 1 to it?
$files{$ARGV}{word_count} += length($_) + 1;
# Addition imposes scalar context, no need for the scalar keyword
$files{$ARGV}{total_words} += #parts;
}
# Print all the information in the hash
foreach (keys %files) {
print "File name: $_",
"\t\t Word Count: $files{$_}{word_count}",
"\t\t Total words: $files{$_}{total_words}",
"\t\t Total lines: $files{$_}{line_count}",
"\n";
}

Answer 2

This line :
foreach my $line(<>)
Is taking input from STDIN. You need to do something like:
for my $file (#user_files) {
open my $fin, '<', $file or die $!;
while ( my $line = <$fin> ) {
# count stuff
}
close $fin;
# print counted stuff
}
Also note that if you want to take multiple filenames as args:
my $user_files = #ARGV;
will only take the first arg. You probably want:
my #user_files = #ARGV;
Also, the chomp on an arg is unnecessary.
In your script, you're counting all the files before printing. Which is good, but you probably want to store that data in an array or hash. That data structure might look like this :
$file_counts = [
{
$file_name1 => {
characters => $characters,
words => $words,
lines => $lines,
}
},
{
$file_name2 => {
characters => $characters,
words => $words,
lines => $lines,
}
},
];