Greetings,

I have written a basic word count script. It incoporates many options that can be used to determing a word, divied a word, remove punctuation, etc... It works, but I am afraid that its not efficient in one aspect.

As of right now, when a word is found in a document punctuation that appears at the beginning and end of the word can be removed. With the user define what punctuation they want removed in a string divided by a space.

• "Wilmer!" -> Wilmer

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $stripped = '" !';
my $word = '"Wilmer!"';
foreach my $punc (split(/ / , $stripped)) {
   #print "punc: $punc\n";
   $word =~ s/^$punc//;
   $word =~ s/$punc$//;
}

print $word;
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I want to know what other monks would do. What is the most efficient method that you can think of? Or perhaps lead me into the right direction, so that I can right the code myself because it is my project and not yours.