Convert XML to Hash

[D'Femstar]

I want my program to access an XML file and extract an element and value of an attribute(done). the problem is there are 42 different keys. Each occurrence of the key has a different value everytime although sometimes a key might have the same value more than once. I want my program to allocate the values to the key it belongs and then count the number of occurrences of each value for each key. Anybody with a snippet of an idea?

2005-04-02 Edited by Arunbear: Changed title from 'Hash Browns', as per Monastery guidelines

[Joost]

something like this?

my %counts;
while (my ($key,$value) = get_key_and_value()) {
  $counts{$key}{$value}++;
}

[samizdat]

Store the values in an anon array as the value of the hash at that key. When you encounter a key,
1. read the array at that value if it exists,
2. push the new value onto the end of the array,
3. then write it back to the value of the hash.
The size of the anon array is the number of times that key appeared, and you can also easily extract the number of unique values.

[graff]

Actually, your step "2" is the only one that's necessary:

# for a simple case, where input is just a "key value" list, and
# when any key is repeated, we want to keep all its values in an array
+:

my %hash;
while (<>) {
    my ( $k, $v ) = split;
    push @{$hash{$k}}, $v;
}

for my $k ( keys %hash ) {
    print "$k occurred ". scalar @{$hash{$k}} ." times\n";
}

(update: but it seems like the OP really wants a hash-of-hashes, as suggested in the first reply above, rather than a hash-of-arrays.)

[jdporter]

How about some sample input and the corresponding desired ouput?