note jjhorner <p>One way to count the occurrence of each character in a string: <code> #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; #never, never leave home without it my %chars = (); my $string = "J. J. is cool!"; foreach my $character (split //, $string) { $chars{$character}++; } print "Report:\n"; foreach my $key (keys %chars) { print "\t$key = $chars{$key}\n"; } </code> Yields: <code> [13:22:15 jhorner@gateway scripts]$ ./20000714-1.pl Report: = 3 ! = 1 o = 2 i = 1 J = 2 c = 1 s = 1 l = 1 . = 2 </code> <pre> J. J. Horner Linux, Perl, Apache, Stronghold, Unix jhorner@knoxlug.org http://www.knoxlug.org/ </pre> 22508 22508