title: Perl String Parsing to Hash
body: <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>