Re^2: Counting words

[zdog]

in reply to Re: Counting words
in thread Counting words

I modified your code a little to fit the problem description slightly better:

use strict;

my $num_words = 4;

my @words = ();
open FILE, "<in.txt" or die $!;
while ( <FILE> )
{
        last if ( push ( @words, m/\s*([^\s]+)\s*/g ) >= $num_words );
}
close FILE;

print join( " ", @words ) . "\n";

As a side note, is there a reason to use [^\s] rather than \S, or is it just a matter of preference? Thanks.

[jbware]

Yeah, "last if" is a good call, I wasn't thinking. The OP wasn't clear exactly how they wanted the results back (string or array of words), so I choose string. Nice convert to array though.

As far as [^\s] versus \S, force of habit. If my laziness virtue would kick in like its supposed to, I'd have switched to \S by now and saved some keystrokes :)

-jbWare