Perl String Parsing to Hash <p>So lets say I had the string.</p> <pre><code> $my str = "Hello how are you today. Oh thats good I'm glad you are happy. Thats wonderful; thats fantastic." </code></pre> <p>I want to create a hash table where each key is a unique word and the value is the number of times it appears in the string i.e., I want it to be an automated process.</p> <pre><code>my %words { "Hello" =&gt; 1, "are" =&gt; 2, "thats" =&gt; 2, "Thats" =&gt; 1 }; </code></pre> <p>I honestly am brand new to PERL and have no clue how to do this, how to handle the punctuation etc.</p> <p>UPDATE:</p> <p>Also, is it possible to use</p> <pre><code> split('.!?;',$mystring) </code></pre> <p>Not with this syntax, but basically split at a . or ! or ? etc.. oh and ' ' (whitespace)</p>