Perl Program to Count Two Character Frequencies - arrays

Question

I am trying to find two character strings in a text file and print them and their frequencies out.
#!/usr/bin/perl
#digram finder
use strict; use warnings;
#finds digrams in a file and prints them and their frequencies out
die "Must input file\n" if (#ARGV != 1);
my ($file) = #ARGV;
my %wordcount;
open (my $in, "<$file") or die "Can't open $file\n";
while (my $words = <$in>){
chomp $words;
my $length = length($words);
for (my $i = 0; $i<$length; $i++){
my $duo = substr($words, $i; 2);
if (not exists $wordcount{$duo}){
$wordcount{$duo} = 1;
}
else {
$wordcount{$duo}++;
}
}
}
foreach my $word (sort {$wordcount{$b} cmp $wordcount{$a}} keys %wordcount){
print "$word\t$wordcount{$duo}\n";
}
close($in);
First I set the text file to a string $words.
Then, I run a for loop and create a substring $duo at each position along $words
If $duo doesn't exist within the hash %wordcount, then the program creates the key $duo
If $duo does exist, then the count for that key goes up by 1
Then the program prints out the digrams and their frequencies, in order of decreasing frequency
When I try to run the code, I get the error message that I forgot to declare $word on line 17 but I do not even have the string $word. I am not sure where this error message is coming from. Can someone help me find where the error is coming from?
Thank you

Answer 1

My best guess is that you actually have $word instead of $words; a typo. If the compilation found the symbol $word in the text then it's probably there.
However, I'd also like to comment on the code. A cleaned up version
while (my $words = <$in>) {
chomp $words;
my $last_duo_idx = length($words) - 2;
for my $i (0 .. $last_duo_idx) {
my $duo = substr($words, $i, 2);
++$wordcount{$duo};
}
}
my #skeys = sort { $wordcount{$b} <=> $wordcount{$a} } keys %wordcount;
foreach my $word (#skeys) {
print "$word\t$wordcount{$word}\n";
}
This runs correctly on a made-up file. (I sort separately only so to not run off of the page.)
Comments
Need to stop one before last in the line, and substr starts from 0; thus -2
One almost never needs a C-style loop
There is no need here to test for existence of a key. If it doesn't exist it is autovivified (created), then incremented to 1 with ++; otherwise the count is incremented.
To sort numerically use <=>, not cmp
Typos:
substr($words, $i; 2) needs a , not ;, so substr($words, $i, 2)
$wordcount{$duo} in print should be $wordcount{$word}.
I am not sure about naming: why is a line of text called $words?