better way to do N to 1 string mapping

[tanyeun]

howdy Monks :D

I use a hash to implement this mapping

%category = (
  "restaurant A" => "Dine Out",
  "restaurant B" => "Dine Out",
  "Walmart"      => "Grocery",
  "HEB"          => "Grocery",
  "Target"       => "Grocery"
  "Movies"       => "Fun",
  "Park"         => "Fun",
  "Shopping"     => "Fun" );

so whenever a given $string
%category{$string} will tell you it's category

This looks ugly since the category will grow larger and larger
and it will duplicates multiple lines with the same category
(for example "Grocery" takes 3 lines)

is there a better way to do this?

something like
"restaurant A", "restaurant b" => "Dine Out"
"Walmart", "HEB", "Target" => "Grocery"
"Movies", "Park", "Shopping" => "Fun"

best,

David

[Corion]

You can turn your mapping on its head, by specifying it like this:

my %store_for_category = (
    "Dine Out" => ['restaurant A', 'restaurant B'],
    "Grocery"  => ['Walmart', 'HEB', 'Target'],
    ...
);

You can convert from the category to the store by:

my %category_for_store;
for my $category (keys %store_for_category) {
    for my $store (@{ $store_for_category{ $category }}) {
        warn "Duplicate category for store '$store': $category_for_sto
+re{ $store }, $category"
            if $category_for_store{ $store };
        $category_for_store{ $store } = $category;
    };
});

Usually, I end up wanting both mappings anyway, from "store" to "category" and to list all stores for a given category. I also tend to want to put a store into more than one category. I end up stuffing the pairs into an SQL database (like DBD::SQLite), but depending on where you keep the rest of the data, that may or may not be suitable for you.

[anneli]

But what's wrong with %category growing larger? If you definitely want to look items up by item, this is pretty much as good as it gets! It's not duplication; it's what you want!

[jethro]

If you are concerned that your perl script will get unwieldy because of this long list, you have many options:

1) Put that list into a second script file, add "1;" as the last line and use require() to load it

2) Put that data into a config file and use a module like Config::Any, Config::JSON, Config::Auto (lots more available) to read that file

3) Use a database (if your data exceeds a few 1000 items)

4) Use a format of your own

Note that the resultant file handling, i.e. locating the config or data file and error handling, will add some lines of code so you should think about whether the smaller script file is worth the added complexity. But if you envision changing the data a lot, a config file might really be a good idea

[mrguy123]

Hi David, like my fellow monks said there is probably no easy way to make this hash smaller.
However, if you are worried the hash might become huge, and it is a hash you might need to use several times, a nice option is to use storable.
That way, you can load very big hashes in a very short time.
Good Luck
Guy

Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand and even harder to modify.

[JavaFan]

is there a better way to do this?

No.