in reply to an easier way with grep, map, and/or sort?

I don't have any clever map sort or grep approaches, but the code could be simplified. For the sequence of if-then statements, one could use
my @institutions = qw|hospital1 hospital2|; my %seen; $seen{$_}++ foreach @institutions; if (!defined $institution) { $institution_table{"unaffiliated"} ++; } elsif (exists $seen{lc $institution}) { $institution_table{lc $institution} ++; } else { $institution_table{"other"} ++; }
For the loop, here is a slightly more clever method:
my $cat_age = int ($age/5) - 9; my @age_cats = qw|fortyfive_fifty fifty_fiftyfive fiftyfive_sixty|; foreach (keys %institution_table) { $institution_table{ $_ }{ $age_cats[$cat_age] }++; }
One could use a map for the loop, but the foreach is faster.

-Mark