How to group and count occurrences of values in Elixir's list

If you ever had to count occurrences of values in Elixir's list, this short post might be helpful for you!
Let's assume that the input contains a list of people names:
people = [
%{name: "John"},
%{name: "Tom"},
%{name: "John"},
%{name: "David"}
]
Our goal here is to count occurrences of names so that in the end we'll get this summary:
%{"David" => 1, "John" => 2, "Tom" => 1}
In Elixir, it's super easy! You can use Enum.frequencies_by/2 to achieve that in a simple one-liner:
iex > Enum.frequencies_by(people, & &1.name)
%{"David" => 1, "John" => 2, "Tom" => 1}
Work with a team that keeps learning and building better software every day.
Related posts
Dive deeper into this topic with these related posts
You might also like
Discover more content from this category
The macro mechanism in Elixir is not only an interesting metaprogramming feature - in fact, it is at the language's very core. And the more awesome fact is that, using macros, you can override the algorithm of defining functions itself!
Hey! Have you ever wondered about tests running inside the IEx shell? For a long time, I was convinced that it’s not really possible. And as it turns out - that’s not really straightforward. You won’t easily find information about that in the documentation.
Ensuring that GraphQL mutations properly update your Apollo client's cache can be a bit tricky - here's how to manually control that.
