better way to do N to 1 string mapping

tanyeun has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

howdy Monks :D

I use a hash to implement this mapping

%category = (
  "restaurant A" => "Dine Out",
  "restaurant B" => "Dine Out",
  "Walmart"      => "Grocery",
  "HEB"          => "Grocery",
  "Target"       => "Grocery"
  "Movies"       => "Fun",
  "Park"         => "Fun",
  "Shopping"     => "Fun" );
[download]

so whenever a given $string
%category{$string} will tell you it's category

This looks ugly since the category will grow larger and larger
and it will duplicates multiple lines with the same category
(for example "Grocery" takes 3 lines)

is there a better way to do this?

something like
"restaurant A", "restaurant b" => "Dine Out"
"Walmart", "HEB", "Target" => "Grocery"
"Movies", "Park", "Shopping" => "Fun"

best,

David

Comment on better way to do N to 1 string mapping Download Code

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Re: better way to do N to 1 string mapping by Corion (Patriarch) on Nov 14, 2011 at 08:07 UTC
You can turn your mapping on its head, by specifying it like this: `my %store_for_category = ( "Dine Out" => ['restaurant A', 'restaurant B'], "Grocery" => ['Walmart', 'HEB', 'Target'], ... );` [download] You can convert from the category to the store by: `my %category_for_store; for my $category (keys %store_for_category) { for my $store (@{ $store_for_category{ $category }}) { warn "Duplicate category for store '$store': $category_for_sto +re{ $store }, $category" if $category_for_store{ $store }; $category_for_store{ $store } = $category; }; });` [download] Usually, I end up wanting both mappings anyway, from "store" to "category" and to list all stores for a given category. I also tend to want to put a store into more than one category. I end up stuffing the pairs into an SQL database (like DBD::SQLite), but depending on where you keep the rest of the data, that may or may not be suitable for you.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: better way to do N to 1 string mapping by anneli (Pilgrim) on Nov 14, 2011 at 07:01 UTC
But what's wrong with `%category` growing larger? If you definitely want to look items up by item, this is pretty much as good as it gets! It's not duplication; it's what you want!	[reply] [d/l]
Re: better way to do N to 1 string mapping by jethro (Monsignor) on Nov 14, 2011 at 10:42 UTC
If you are concerned that your perl script will get unwieldy because of this long list, you have many options: 1) Put that list into a second script file, add "1;" as the last line and use require() to load it 2) Put that data into a config file and use a module like Config::Any, Config::JSON, Config::Auto (lots more available) to read that file 3) Use a database (if your data exceeds a few 1000 items) 4) Use a format of your own Note that the resultant file handling, i.e. locating the config or data file and error handling, will add some lines of code so you should think about whether the smaller script file is worth the added complexity. But if you envision changing the data a lot, a config file might really be a good idea	[reply]
Re: better way to do N to 1 string mapping by mrguy123 (Hermit) on Nov 14, 2011 at 11:52 UTC
Hi David, like my fellow monks said there is probably no easy way to make this hash smaller. However, if you are worried the hash might become huge, and it is a hash you might need to use several times, a nice option is to use storable. That way, you can load very big hashes in a very short time. Good Luck Guy Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand and even harder to modify.	[reply]
Re: better way to do N to 1 string mapping by JavaFan (Canon) on Nov 14, 2011 at 09:20 UTC
is there a better way to do this? No.	[reply]