Re^2: 2 newby questions

[Socrates440]

Wow, I did not expect this much feedback. Thank you all. I took what you posted, what my book recommended, and some other bits and pieces of information and I tried to reconstruct the program in my own way as best I could. Any critiques would be helpful. Particularly, how I could condense the program into fewer lines. Thanks!

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my ($counter, $words, %counter) ;
print "This program records all of the words you type and counts how o
+ften you type them.\nPlease type in a list of words.  Type done when 
+you are finished.\n" ;
chomp ($words = <STDIN>) ;
while ($words ne "done") {
    chomp ($words = <STDIN>) ;
    if ($words eq "done") {
        last ;
    }
    $counter{$words}++ ;
}
foreach $words (keys%counter) {
    if ($counter{$words} <= 1) {
        print "You typed $words $counter{$words} time."
    }
    else {
        print "You typed $words $counter{$words} times." ;
    }
}

[aaron_baugher]

You're kind of repeating yourself inside and outside your while loop, so that can be condensed. Here's a more perlish way to do it. It confines the $word variable to the smallest possible scope, and uses a statement modifier after last to shorten things and make the logic clearer (in my opinion).

while( my $word = <STDIN> ){
  chomp $word;
  last if $word eq 'done';
  $counter{$word}++;
}

On your foreach loop, you can eliminate the if/else with a ternary operator:

for my $word (keys %counter){
  print "You typed $word $counter{$word} time" .($counter{$word}>1 ? '
+s' : ''). ".\n";
  # or
  printf "You typed %s %d time%s.\n", $word, $counter{$word}, ($counte
+r{$word}>1?'s':'');
}

[hbm]

You can shorten your while loop:

$counter{$_}++  while chomp($_ = <>) && !/^done$/i;

I threw in !/^done$/i to terminate on "Done", "DONE", etc.

And note the subtle suggestion of others to change $words to $word, which is clearer.

[Anonymous Monk]

What about this one, is this code condensed enough?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;

my %counter;
print
    "This program records all of the words you type and counts how oft
+en you type them.\nPlease type in a list of words.  Type done when yo
+u are finished.\n";

$counter{$_}++  while chomp($_ = <STDIN>) && !/^done$/i;

foreach my $line ( sort keys %counter ) {
    printf "You typed '$line' $counter{$line} time%s.\n", ($counter{$l
+ine} == 1) ? "" : "s";    
}

Also note the 'my' in the foreach, always use this idiom!