in reply to Put multiple values as columns inside a hash

(update: sorry, it seems I misread your description — too early in the morning... :)


but the occurrence rate for some months is actually 0, ...

When you have an input line with less than 5 months columns like

L122Q 97.56097561 100 100 100

how do you want to tell if it actually should have been

L122Q 0 97.56097561 100 100 100

or

L122Q 97.56097561 100 100 100 0

or

L122Q 97.56097561 0 100 100 100

i.e. how would you disambiguate?