Count the occurrences of a string in a file - perl

Question

I wrote a perl script to count the occurrences of a character in a file.
So far this is what I have got,
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use warnings;
no warnings ('uninitialized', 'substr');
my $lines_ref;
my #lines;
my $count;
sub countModule()
{
my $file = "/test";
open my $fh, "<",$file or die "could not open $file: $!";
my #contents = $fh;
my #filtered = grep (/\// ,#contents);
return \#filtered;
}
#lines = countModule();
##lines = $lines_ref;
$count = #lines;
print "###########\n $count \n###########\n";
My test file looks like this:
10.0.0.1/24
192.168.10.0/24
172.16.30.1/24
I am basically trying to count the number of instances of "/"
This is the output that I get:
###########
1
###########
I am getting 1 instead of 3, which is the number of occurrences.
Still learning perl, so any help will be appreciated..Thank you!!

Answer 1

Here are a few points about your code
You should always use strict at the top of your program, and only use no warnings for special reasons in a limited scope. There is no general reason why a working Perl program should need to disable warnings globally
Declare your variables close to their first point of use. The style of declaring everything at the top of the file is unnecessary and is a legacy of C
Never use prototypes in your code. They are available for very special purposes and shouldn't be used for the vast majority of Perl code. sub countModule() { ... } insists that countModule may never be called with any parameters and isn't necessary or useful. The definition should be just sub countModule { ... }
A big well done! for using a lexical file handle, the three-parameter form of open, and putting $! in your die string
my #contents = $fh will just set #contents to a single-element list containing just the filehandle. To read the whole file into the array you need my #contents = <$fh>
You can avoid escaping slashes in a regular expression if you use a different delimiter. To do that you need to use the m operator explicitly, like my #filtered = grep m|/|, #contents)
You return an array reference but assign the returned value to an array, so #lines = countModule() sets #lines to a single-element list containing just the array reference. You should either return a list with return #filtered or dereference the return value on assignment with #lines = #{ countModule }
If all you need to do is to print the number of lines in the file that contain a slash character then you could write something like this
use strict;
use warnings;
my $count;
sub countModule {
open my $fh, '<', '/test' or die "Could not open $file: $!";
return [ grep m|/|, <$fh> ];
}
my $lines = countModule;
$count = #$lines;
print "###########\n $count \n###########\n";

Answer 2

Close, but a few issues:
use strict;
use warnings;
sub countModule
{
my $file = "/test";
open my $fh, "<",$file or die "could not open $file: $!";
my #contents = <$fh>; # The <> brackets are used to read from $fh.
my #filtered = grep (/\// ,#contents);
return #filtered; # Remove the reference.
}
my #lines = countModule();
my $count = scalar #lines; # 'scalar' is not required, but lends clarity.
print "###########\n $count \n###########\n";
Each of the changes I made to your code are annotated with a #comment explaining what was done.
Now in list context your subroutine will return the filtered lines. In scalar context it will return a count of how many lines were filtered.
You did also mention find the occurrences of a character (despite everything in your script being line-oriented). Perhaps your counter sub would look like this:
sub file_tallies{
my $file = '/test';
open my $fh, '<', $file or die $!;
my $count;
my $lines;
while( <$fh> ) {
$lines++;
$count += $_ =~ tr[\/][\/];
}
return ( $lines, $count );
}
my( $line_count, $slash_count ) = file_tallies();

Answer 3

In list context,
return \#filtered;
returns a list with one element -- a reference to the named array #filtered. Maybe you wanted to return the list itself
return #filtered;

Answer 4

Here's some simpler code:
sub countMatches {
my ($file, $c) = #_; # Pass parameters
local $/;
undef $/; # Slurp input
open my $fh, "<",$file or die "could not open $file: $!";
my $s = <$fh>; # The <> brackets are used to read from $fh.
close $fh;
my $ptn = quotemeta($c); # So we can match strings like ".*" verbatim
my #hits = $s =~ m/($ptn)/g;
0 + #hits
}
print countMatches ("/test", '/') . "\n";
The code pushes Perl beyond the very basics, but not too much. Salient points:
By undeffing $/ you can read the input into one string. If you're counting
occurrences of a string in a file, and not occurrences of lines that contain
the string, this is usually easier to do.
m/(...)/g will find all the hits, but if you want to count strings like
"." you need to quote the meta characters in them.
Store the results in an array to evaluate m// in list context
Adding 0 to a list gives the number of items in it.