Re^6: putting text into array word by word

[jms53]

in reply to Re^5: putting text into array word by word
in thread putting text into array word by word

during the foreach loop I remove punctuation and set to lowercase (such that No and no are the same word.

while (<FILE>) 
{ 
   my @these_words = split(' ', $_);
   foreach my $this_word (@these_words)
   {
      
      $this_word =~ s/[[:punct:]]//g;
      $this_word = lc($this_word);
      push @all_words, $this_word;
     

   }
}

[Not_a_Number]

$this_word =~ s/[[:punct:]]//g;

The only problem with that approach is that it removes internal punctuation (ie apostrophes) as well, so that I'll becomes ill, she'd becomes shed, etc. ('Why was Virgina Woolf so obsessed with sheds?' I hear someone ask.)

I'd use this instead:

$this_word =~ s/^[[:punct:]]+//; # Remove leading punct.
$this_word =~ s/[[:punct:]]+$//; # Remove trailing punct.

Update: added Virginia Woolf sentence.

[jms53]

hadn't thought about that. Good catch, thanks!

[Not_a_Number]

OK, let's extract another worm from the can we've opened. Say we want to count all the times 'John' appears in a text. Given a sentence:

Was it John or John's brother?

Should the count be one or two?