You could convert it to graphical form very easily. In that case, I'd use the 2D array form, and then in the printout loop, generate the contents of each square based on its value.

For ASCII graphics, you could set thresholds for different counts, such as ' ' for no animals, '.' for 1-2, ':' for 3-6, '*' for 7-15 and '#' for 15+ or some such. If you wanted HTML, you could do basically the same thing, just generate your table cells with something like:

<td bgcolor="xxxxxx">&nbsp;</td>

[download]
filling in the appropriate background color based on the number of critter matches.

--roboticus

In reply to Re^4: help with 2D arrays with perl requested by roboticus
in thread help with 2D arrays with perl requested by Anonymous Monk

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