Re: Perl beginner's issue with hash

Read the entire file into an array rather than opening and reading it inside the loop. Use grep in scalar context to do the counting.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
my $file = \"a\nb\nb\nc\nc\nd\nd\nd\nf\nf\nf";  # In memory 'file'
my @ids = qw( a b c d e f g );
open my $FILE, '<', $file or die "cannot open input file";
my @lines = <$FILE>;  # Read entire file into an array
close $FILE;

my %counts;
ID:
foreach my $id (@ids) {
    my $count = grep { /$id/ } @lines;
    if ($count) {
        $counts{$id} = $count;
        next ID;
    }
    warn "$id not found\n";
}

print Dumper \%counts;

OUTPUT:
e not found
g not found
$VAR1 = {
          'd' => 3,
          'a' => 1,
          'c' => 2,
          'f' => 3,
          'b' => 2
        };