Oh wise ones, Lets suppose we have a table consisting of non unique rows which i want to collapse and sum up: 
string1 10
string2 30
string1 0
string4 39
string9 345

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etc. I usually use hashes to keep count with a loop: 
my $rh_count = { } ;
if ( exists $rh_count->{$string} ) {
     $rh_count->{$string}++ ; #increment
} else {
     $rh_count->{$string}=1 ; #set to one 
}

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What i am looking for, is there a more 'elegant' way of doing this. I know this is a minor detail but I was wondering if there is any other way of doing so. Consider the number of different strings not to be known in advance so pre-declaring the hash with the elements inside just to increment them would not work. Bless you

In reply to using hashes to count by spiros

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