Perl Programming/Simple Examples 1

#!/usr/bin/perl
# let's ask the compiler to be more strict, make sure we declare our variables etc.
use strict;
 
# This statement prompts the user for a filename to read from.
print "What file would you like to read from?\n";
 
# This statement assigns whatever is given on the standard input(usually your keyboard) to a scalar
# variable named $filename and removes the newline character that is included by default.
chomp (my $filename = <STDIN>);
 
# This line opens the file referred to in $filename for input via a filehandle named "FILE".
open FILE, "<", $filename or die "Can't open '$filename' for reading: $^E\n";
 
# This loop goes through each line of the file, splits the line into separate characters and
# increments the number of occurrences of each letter using a hash called "%chars".
 
my %chars;
while(<FILE>) {
    $_ = lc($_); # convert everything to lowercase
    my @characters = split (//, $_);  # Store list of characters in an array
    foreach (@characters) {
        if(/\w/) {                    # Ignore all characters except letters and numbers
            $chars{$_}++;
        }
    }
}
close FILE;
 
# This loop goes through each letter in the %chars hash and prints a report informing the user of
# how many times each letter occurred.
 
foreach my $key (sort keys %chars) {
    if($chars{$key} == 1) {
        print "$key appeared once.\n";
    } else {
        print "$key appeared $chars{$key} times.\n";
    }
}