Question

I was wondering if you could help me with a coding problem which I can’t get my head around. The tab-delimited data I have looks like something like the following:

00001  AU:137  AU:150  AU:180
00001  AU:137  AU:170
00002  AU:180
00003  AU:147  AU:155
00003  AU:155

The output I want is:

00001  AU:137  AU:150  AU:180  AU:170
00002  AU:180
00003  AU:147  AU:155

So the first column (identifier) will merge the values, removing duplicates, so that it becomes a hash. I’m not sure how to work with my current data because it can’t be a hash having duplicate keys. I’m also not sure how to push the data into an array if the identifier is the same.

I apologize for not having a code. I did try a few, actually, quite a lot, but they don’t look right even to a newbie like myself.

Any help, suggestions would be greatly appreciated and thank you so much for your time and answer. I greatly appreciate it.

Answer 1

Script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my %hash;
sub uniq { return keys %{{map {$_=>1} @_}}; }

open my $fh, '<input.txt' or die $!;
foreach (<$fh>) {
  $hash{$1} .= $2 if /^(\S+)(\s.*?)[\n\r]*$/;
}
close $fh;

foreach (sort keys %hash) {
  my @elements = uniq split /\t/, $hash{$_};
  print "$_\t", join(' ', sort @elements), "\n";
}

Output:

00001    AU:137 AU:150 AU:170 AU:180
00002    AU:180
00003    AU:147 AU:155