"Use of uninitialized value" when indexing an array - arrays

Question

I get the following error from Perl when trying to run the code below
Use of uninitialized value within #words in concatenation (.) or string...
It references the line where I try to create an array made up of three-word sequences (the line that starts with $trigrams). Can anyone help me figure out the problem?
my %hash;
my #words;
my $word;
my #trigrams;
my $i = 0;
while (<>) {
#words = split;
foreach $word (#words) {
$hash{$word}++;
# Now trying to create the distinct six-grams in the 10-K.
$trigrams[$i] = join " ", $words[$i], $words[$i + 1], $words[$i + 2];
print "$words[$i]\n";
$i++;
}
}

Answer 1

All that is happening is that you are falling off the end of the array #words. You are executing the loop for each element of #words, so the value of $i goes from 0 to $#words, or the index of the final element of the array. So the line
join " ", $words[$i], $words[$i + 1], $words[$i + 2];
accesses the last element of the array $words[$i] and two elements beyond that which don't exist.
In this case, as with any loop which uses the current index of an array, it is easiest to iterate over the array indices instead of the contents. For the join to be valid you need to start at zero and stop at two elements before the end, so 0 .. $#words-2.
It is also neater to use an array slice to select the three elements for the trigram, and use the fact that interpolating an array into a string, as in "#array", will do the same as join ' ', #array. (More precisely, it does join $", #array, and $" is set to a single space by default.)
I suggest this fix. It is essential to use strict and use warnings at the start of every Perl program, and you should declare all your variables using my as late as possible.
use strict;
use warnings;
my %hash;
while (<>) {
my #words = split;
my #trigrams;
for my $i (0 .. $#words - 2) {
my $word = $words[$i];
++$hash{$word};
$trigrams[$i] = "#words[$i,$i+1,$i+2]";
print "$word\n";
}
}
Update
You may prefer this if it isn't too terse for you
use strict;
use warnings;
my %hash;
while (<>) {
my #words = split;
my #trigrams = map "#words[$_,$_+1,$_+2]", 0 .. $#words-2;
}