I feel like I should go to confession to say this, but here goes: I'm not very good with map, and terrible with sort and grep. I am, however, getting to the point that I can tell when I should be using one of these functions, and I think I've found just such a case. Sadly, I don't know what to do now, as I certainly don't want to go on write more unnecessary and inefficient lines of code, but don't have the skills I need to do it in better way.

I need to go through an array of hashes where the hashes all have the keys instiution, race, age. I need to know how many men in various age ranges are enrolled in each institution, and how many men of those age ranges are of each race. I started to do something like this: 

# there are actually lots more institutions than this,
# but this gets the point across
if (!defined $institution) {
    $institution_table{"unaffiliated"} ++;
} elsif ($institution =~ /^$hospital1$/i) {
    $institution_table{$hospital1} ++;
} elsif ($institution =~ /^$hospital2$/i) {
    $institution_table{$hospital2} ++;
} else {
    $institution_table{"other"} ++;
}
foreach (sort keys %institution_table) {
    $institution_table{$_}{"fortyfive_fifty"} ++ 
        if  (45 < $age <= 50);
    $institution_table{$_}{"fifty_fiftyfive"} ++ 
        if  (50 < $age <= 55);
    $institution_table{$_}{"fiftyfive_sixty"} ++ 
        if  (55 < $age <= 60);

    #...and so on up through the 85-90 age bracket
}

[download]
aside from being really ugly, I'm pretty sure it's not even close to being the best way to do this. I've got a strong intuition that the answers lie in doing sexy things with grep, map, and/or sort, but that's about all I've got (aside from a pile of ugly code).

So, any suggestions on how to find the number of men in each age range at each hospital?

thanks for any help,
--au

In reply to an easier way with grep, map, and/or sort? by aufrank

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