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

Article autor
January 30, 2022
How to group and count occurrences of values in Elixir's list
Elixir Newsletter
Join Elixir newsletter

Subscribe to receive Elixir news to your inbox every two weeks.

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Elixir Newsletter
Expand your skills

Download free e-books, watch expert tech talks, and explore open-source projects. Everything you need to grow as a developer - completely free.

Table of contents

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

No items found.

You might also like

Discover more content from this category

How to find DOM elements that cause body overflow

Sometimes you may notice that your website displays an unintended horizontal scrollbar. You may be wondering what is the cause.

How to revert commit in Git

Did you ever create a commit that you wish never happened? Let's be honest - we all did. There is an easy way to revert it in Git.

How to contain a fixed positioned element

It's easy to contain absolute positioned elements. Things get a little trickier when you want to contain a fixed positioned element without changing its stylings.