Making a whole heap of assumptions (e.g that those three terms are the only ones that will appear, that they will appear only once in a particular array, that regardless of order they arrays are the same, etc).
use strict;
use warnings;

my @occurances = ( 
 [ 'male' ],
 [ 'male' ],
 [ 'male', 'child' ],
 [ 'female' ],
 [ 'child', 'female' ],
 [ 'female', 'child' ],
 [ 'female', 'male', 'child' ],
 );

my @terms = (
  [ 'male' ],
  [ 'female' ],
  [ 'child' ],
  [ 'male', 'female' ],
  [ 'male', 'child' ],
  [ 'female', 'child' ],
  [ 'male', 'female', 'child' ],
);

my %tally;
foreach my $array_ref ( @occurances ) {
  $tally{stringify(@$array_ref)}++;
}

foreach my $array_ref ( @terms ) {
 if ( defined $tally{stringify(@$array_ref)}) {
   print "Terms:" . 
      join (" and ", @$array_ref) . 
      " were found " . 
      $tally{stringify(@$array_ref)} . " times\n" 
 }
 else { print "Terms:" . 
         join (" and ", @$array_ref) . 
         " were found 0 times\n"  
 }
}

sub stringify { join ("+", sort {$b cmp $a} @_) }

[download]
Note that I did switch your hashes for arrays, as it made more sense to me to have them this way.

-enlil

In reply to Re: matching arrays by Enlil
in thread matching arrays by rsiedl

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.