I had been counting using BBEdit’s “find all” command, which was helpful but assumed I knew which words I was overusing to begin with and gave me no printed report. I knew there had to be a more efficient way. This is magnificent! Thank you!

Regards,
-Phil

my %word_list; # this hash will have an entry for every distinct word
my $count = 0; # count of distinct words
my $total_words =0; # total # of words used
my $file = shift; # name of text file to parse

open FILE, “<$file”;

while (){ #for each line in the file

my @words = split; # split each line into separate words

foreach my $word (@words) { # for each word on that line

$word =~ s/[.]//g; # strip any periods
$word =~ s/”//g; # strip any quotes
$word =~ s/“//g; # strip any quotes
$word =~ s/”//g; # strip any quotes
$word =~ s/,//g; # strip any commas
$word =~ s/’//g; # strip any apostrophes
$word =~ s/://g; # strip any colons
$word =~ s/’//g; # strip any single-quotes
$word =~ s/;//g; # strip any semicolons
$word =~ s/!//g; # strip any exclamation points
$word =~ s/\?//g; # strip any question marks

$word = lc($word);
# unless ($word =~ /ly/) {next;} # remove the first # sign if you want to look for adverbs

if ($word_list{$word}) { # if the word has already been seen increment the count
$word_list{$word}++;
}
else {
$word_list{$word} = 1; # else it’s a new word, start with 1
}
$total_words++; # increment counter for total # of words
}
}
print “\nWord usage in $file\n\n\n”;

foreach $key (sort sort_values (keys(%word_list))) { # get the keys, sort them by value, for each one
print “$word_list{$key} \t $key\n”;
$count ++; # increment counter for distinct # of words
}

print “\n\nTotal of $total_words words, $count distinct words used\n”;

sub sort_values { # sort a hash by value
$word_list{$a} $word_list{$b};
}