I've already worked out this solution for myself with PHP, but I'm curious how it could be done differently - better even. The two languages I'm primarily interested in are PHP and Javascript, but I'd be interested in seeing how quickly this could be done in any other major language today as well (mostly C#, Java, etc).
Extra Credit
Extra-Extra Credit
*"The fruit fly is a great thing when it comes to medical research. Much study has been done on the fruit fly in the past, and has lead to many breakthroughs. In the future, the fruit fly will continue to be studied, but our methods may change."*Clearly the word here is "fruit fly," which is easy for us to find. Can your search'n'scrape script determine this too?
Source text: http://sampsonresume.com/labs/c.txt
Answer Format
GNU scripting
sed -e 's/ /\n/g' | grep -v '^ *$' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
Results:
7 be
6 to
[...]
1 2.
1 -
With occurence greater than X:
sed -e 's/ /\n/g' | grep -v '^ *$' | sort | uniq -c | awk '$1>X'
Return only words with a length greater than Y (put Y+1 dots in second grep):
sed -e 's/ /\n/g' | grep -v '^ *$' | grep .... | sort | uniq -c
Ignore common terms like "and, is, the, etc" (assuming that the common terms are in file 'ignored')
sed -e 's/ /\n/g' | grep -v '^ *$' | grep -vf ignored | sort | uniq -c
Feel free to strip punctuation prior to processing (ie. "John's" becomes "John"):
sed -e 's/[,.:"\']//g;s/ /\n/g' | grep -v '^ *$' | sort | uniq -c
Return results in a collection/array: it is already like an array for shell: first column is count, second is word.