count number of times string repeated in file perl - perl

Question

I am new to Perl, by the way. I have a Perl script that needs to count the number of times a string appears in the file. The script gets the word from the file itself.
I need it to grab the first word in the file and then search the rest of the file to see if it is repeated anywhere else. If it is repeated I need it to return the amount of times it was repeated. If it was not repeated, it can return 0. I need it to then get the next word in the file and check this again.
I will grab the first word from the file, search the file for repeats of that word, grab the second word from
the file, search the file for repeats of that word, grab the third word from the file, search the file for repeats of that word.
So far I have a while loop that is grabbing each word I need, but I do not know how to get it to search for repeats without resetting the position of my current line. So how do I do this? Any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!
while (<theFile>) {
my $line1 = $_;
my $startHere = rindex($line1, ",");
my $theName = substr($line1, $startHere + 1, length($line1) - $startHere);
#print "the name: ".$theName."\n";
}

Answer 1

Use a hashtable;
my %wordcount = ();
while(my $line = <theFile>)
{
chomp($line);
my #words = split(' ', $line);
foreach my $word(#words)
{
$wordCount{$word} += 1;
}
}
# output
foreach my $key(keys %wordCount)
{
print "Word: $key Repeat_Count: " . ($wordCount{$key} - 1) . "\n";
}
The $wordCount{$key} - 1 in the output accounts for the first time a word was seen; Words that only apprear once in the file will have a count of 0
Unless this is actually homework and/or you have to achieve the results in the specific manor you describe, this is going to be FAR more efficient.
Edit: From your comment below:
Each word i am searching for is not "the first word" it is a certain word on the line. Basically i have a csv file and i am skipping to the third value and searching for repeats of it.
I would still use this approach. What you would want to do is:
split on , since this is a CSV file
Pull out the 3rd word in the array on each line and store the words you are interested in in their own hash table
At the end, iterate through the "search word" hash table, and pull out the counts from the wordcount table
So:
my #words = split(',', $line);
$searchTable{#words[2]} = 1;
...
foreach my $key(keys %searchTable)
{
print "Word: $key Repeat_Count: " . ($wordCount{$key} - 1) . "\n";
}
you'll have to adjust according to what rules you have around counting words that repeat in the third column. You could just remove them from #words before the loop that inserts into your wordCount hash.

Answer 2

my $word = <theFile>
chomp($word); #`assuming word is by itself.
my $wordcount = 0;
foreach my $line (<theFile>) {
$line =~ s/$word/$wordcount++/eg;
}
print $wordcount."\n";
Look up the regex flag 'e' for more on what this does. I didn't test the code, but something like it should work. For clarification, the 'e' flag evaluates the second part of the regex (the substitution) as code before replacing, but it's more than that, so with that flag you should be able to make this work.
Now that I understand what you are asking for, the above solution won't work. What you can do, is use sysread to read the entire file into a buffer, and run the same substition after that, but you will have to get the first word off manually, or you can just decrement after the fact. This is because the sysread filehandle and the regular filehandle are handled differently, so try this:
my $word = <theFile>
chomp($word); #`assuming word is by itself.
my $wordcount = 0;
my $srline = '';
#some arbitrary very long length, longer than file
#Looping also possible.
sysread(theFile,$srline,10000000)
$srline =~ s/$word/$wordcount++/eg;
$wordcount--; # I think that the first word will still be in here, causing issues, you should test.
print $wordcount."\n";
Now, given that I read your comment responding to your question, I don't think that your current algorithm is optimal, and you probably want a hash storing up all of the counts for words in a file. This would probably be best done using something like the following:
my %counts = ();
foreach my $line (<theFile>) {
$line =~ s/(\w+)/$counts{$1}++/eg;
}
# now %counts contains key-value pair words for everything in the file.

Answer 3

To find count of all words present in the file you can do something like:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my %count_of;
while (my $line = <>) { #read from file or STDIN
foreach my $word (split /\s+/, $line) {
$count_of{$word}++;
}
}
print "All words and their counts: \n";
for my $word (sort keys %count_of) {
print "'$word': $count_of{$word}\n";
}
__END__