Hi all, I just learned Perl for my work and I've got a quick question if someone could help me. A program I wrote reads in a list of eight-bit hex numbers. The first four is a command, the last four are arguments to that command. My program generates a summary of which commands occurred and what arguments did they occur with. Simple enough: 
Command 01a3 executed 6 times:
     0213
     0214
     0215
     0216
     0217
     0218

[download]
The thing is, some commands will run around 35 to 40 times, and to keep them all in one column is not exactly a great use of space considering these reports are printed and kept hard-copy. So, what I need is a way to create multiple columns (up to 4) based on how many entries there are in the array in which I keep those numbers. I wrote a fast solution to do this with duplicate commands/arguments as the entries, but it's not the most elegant (I begin teaching myself Perl about a month ago): 
###this code only prints up to 3 columns, not 4

print OUT "\nThe following ", scalar @dupes, " tokens were duplicated:
+\n";

if(@dupes<=10)
{
    foreach (@dupes)
    {
        print OUT "\t$_\n";
    }
}

elsif(@dupes<=20)    #print two columns of dupes
{
    for($i=0; $i<=10; $i++)
    {
        if(defined ($dupes[10+$i]))
            {
                $_=$dupes[$i]."\t".$dupes[10+$i];
            }
        else
            {
                $_=$dupes[$i];
            }
        print OUT "$_\n";
    }
}

else         #print three columns
{
    no warnings;
    
    for($i=0; $i<=(@dupes/3); $i++)
    {
        if(defined $dupes[$i+(2/3)*@dupes])
        {
            $_=$dupes[$i]."\t\t".$dupes[(1/3)*@dupes+$i+1]."\t\t".$dup
+es[(2/3)*@dupes+$i+2];
        }
        elsif(defined $dupes[$i+(1/3)*@dupes])
        {
            $_=$dupes[$i]."\t\t".$dupes[(1/3)*@dupes+$i+1];
        }
        else
        {
            $_=$dupes[$i];
        }
        
        print OUT "\t$_\n";
    }
}

[download]
While I can probably use this code to implement multiple columns, I would probably screw something up when it came time to maintain it. It took forever to tweak that code as it was to make sure I didn't either accidentally reprint a line or skip a line. Any ideas? I'd be much obliged.

In reply to Long array -> multiple columns? by azredwing

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