Build an ASCII chart of the most commonly used words in a given text [closed]

Answer 1

Perl, 237 229 209 chars

(Updated again to beat the Ruby version with more dirty golf tricks, replacing split/[^a-z/,lc with lc=~/[a-z]+/g, and eliminating a check for empty string in another place. These were inspired by the Ruby version, so credit where credit is due.)

Update: now with Perl 5.10! Replace print with say, and use ~~ to avoid a map. This has to be invoked on the command line as perl -E '' alice.txt. Since the entire script is on one line, writing it as a one-liner shouldn't present any difficulty :).

 @s=qw/the and of to a i it in or is/;$c{$_}++foreach grep{!($_~~@s)}map{lc=~/[a-z]+/g}<>;@s=sort{$c{$b}<=>$c{$a}}keys%c;$f=76-length$s[0];say" "."_"x$f;say"|"."_"x($c{$_}/$c{$s[0]}*$f)."| $_ "foreach@s[0..21];

Note that this version normalizes for case. This doesn't shorten the solution any, since removing ,lc (for lower-casing) requires you to add A-Z to the split regex, so it's a wash.

If you're on a system where a newline is one character and not two, you can shorten this by another two chars by using a literal newline in place of \n. However, I haven't written the above sample that way, since it's "clearer" (ha!) that way.

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Here is a mostly correct, but not remotely short enough, perl solution:

use strict;
use warnings;

my %short = map { $_ => 1 } qw/the and of to a i it in or is/;
my %count = ();

$count{$_}++ foreach grep { $_ && !$short{$_} } map { split /[^a-zA-Z]/ } (<>);
my @sorted = (sort { $count{$b} <=> $count{$a} } keys %count)[0..21];
my $widest = 76 - (length $sorted[0]);

print " " . ("_" x $widest) . "\n";
foreach (@sorted)
{
    my $width = int(($count{$_} / $count{$sorted[0]}) * $widest);
    print "|" . ("_" x $width) . "| $_ \n";
}

The following is about as short as it can get while remaining relatively readable. (392 chars).

%short = map { $_ => 1 } qw/the and of to a i it in or is/;
%count;

$count{$_}++ foreach grep { $_ && !$short{$_} } map { split /[^a-z]/, lc } (<>);
@sorted = (sort { $count{$b} <=> $count{$a} } keys %count)[0..21];
$widest = 76 - (length $sorted[0]);

print " " . "_" x $widest . "\n";
print"|" . "_" x int(($count{$_} / $count{$sorted[0]}) * $widest) . "| $_ \n" foreach @sorted;