Question

Updated:

After my initial post and responses, I managed to have another crack and have written out my aims and results a bit clearer:

Aim:

I’m attempting to count the number of hits in a search string of a log file to figure out how many occurrences of a message are generated in the following ways:

• Total per day.
• Total per hour.
• Highest per min, per hour.
• Highest per sec, per hour.

My working code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my @a =  (  
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:43:43/ ],
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:43:43/ ],
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:43:44/ ],
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:43:44/ ],
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:43:44/ ],
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:43:45/ ],
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:43:45/ ],
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:43:45/ ],
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:43:45/ ],
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:44:47/ ],
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:44:47/ ],
    [ qw /2012-02-22_09:44:49/ ],
    [ qw /2012-02-21_10:44:49/ ]
);

my ( %count, $count ) = ();

foreach (@a) {
    my $line = @$_[0] ;
    $line =~ /(\S+)_(\d+):(\d+):(\d+)/ ;

    my $day = $1;
    my $hour= $2;
    my $min = $3;
    my $sec = $4;

    $count {$day}->{$hour}->{$min}->{$sec}{'sec'} += 1 ;
    $count {$day}->{$hour}->{$min}{'min'} += 1 ;
    $count {$day}->{$hour}{'hour'} += 1 ;
    $count {$day}{'day'}  += 1 ;
}

#print Dumper (%count) . "\n";

foreach my $k1 ( sort keys %count ) {
    print "$k1\t$count{$k1}{'day'}\n" ;

    foreach my $k2 ( sort keys %{$count{$k1}} ) {
        if ($k2 =~ /day/) {
            next;
        }
        print " $k2:00\t\t$count{$k1}{$k2}->{'hour'}\n";

        foreach my $k3 ( sort keys %{$count{$k1}{$k2}} ) {
            if ($k3 =~ /hour/) {
                next;
            }
            print "  $k2:$k3\t\t$count{$k1}{$k2}{$k3}->{'min'}\n";

            foreach my $k4 ( sort keys %{$count{$k1}{$k2}{$k3}} ) {
                if ($k4 =~ /min/) {
                    next;
                }
                print "   $k2:$k3:$k4\t$count{$k1}{$k2}{$k3}{$k4}->{'sec'}\n";              
            }
            print "\n";
        }
        print "\n";
    }
}
exit;

Results

I’ve had to turn off strict (of which I am ashamed), due to my poor hash dereference methods.

2012-02-21  12
 09:00      11
  09:43     9
   09:43:43 2
   09:43:44 3
   09:43:45 4

  09:44     2
   09:44:47 2

 10:00      1
  10:44     1
   10:44:49 1

Attempting to output:

2012-02-21  12
 09:00      11
  09:43     9
   09:43:45 4   

 10:00      1
  10:44     1
   10:44:49 1

Questions:

1. Is there a better way of writing the code, and turning on strict?
2. How would I go about listing the highest occurrence of a hash value within a hash, in an attempt to list the highest number count only?

Thanks for all the previous posts, I couldn’t have gotten this far without them.

Cheers,

Andy

Answer 1

It can be simplified somewhat (I also made some stylistic changes to improve readability):

my @data =  (
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:43:43/ ],
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:43:43/ ]
);
my %counts;   
foreach my $words (@data) {
    my ($day, $hour) = ($words->[0] =~ /(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(\d+):/ );
    $counts{$day}->{$hour} += 1;
}
foreach my $day (keys %counts) {
    foreach my $hour (keys %{ $counts{$day} }) { 
        print "Hour count for $day:$hour is: $counts{$day}->{$hour}\n";
    }
}

The working part of the loop that is central to your query is this:

    my ($day, $hour) = ($words->[0] =~ /(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(\d+):/ );

    # You don't need minutes/seconds, so don't match them
    # On the other hand, it's better to match YYYY/MM/DD explicitly!
    # A regexp match in a list context will return a list of captures! 
    #     e.g. ($1, $2, ...)

    $counts{$day}->{$hour} += 1;
    # You need to merely add 1 to a value. No need to push ones on a list.

    # Please note that if the data is not guaranteed to be perfectly formatted, 
    # you need to defend against non-matches:
    $counts{$day}->{$hour} += 1 if (defined $day && defined $hour);

Here’s the same code with comments added clarifying why I made the stylistic changes:

my @data =  (  # Don't use @a - variable name should have meanings
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:43:43/ ], # Not sure why you are using an array ref with
    [ qw /2012-02-21_09:43:43/ ], #   just 1 element, but let's pretend that is OK
);
my %counts;   
foreach my $words (@data) { # Almost never rely on $_ - less readable
    my ($day, $hour) = ($words->[0] =~ /(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(\d+):/ ;
    $counts{$day}->{$hour} += 1; # You can omit "->" but that's less readable
}
foreach my $day (keys %counts) { # Always localize your variable to the block they need
    foreach my $hour (keys %{ $counts{$day} }) { 
        print "Hour count for $day:$hour is: $counts{$day}->{$hour}\n";
    }
}