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

Treating warnings as errors in Elixir's mix compile

Warnings in Elixir are usually an important sign of a problem in the codebase. There is an easy way to make them gone.

How to get the struct type in Elixir

So you don’t know what’s the type of struct you’re passing somewhere? Maybe it can be one of few types and you have to distinguish them? Or any other reason… But it’s about checking the struct type. Just use one of the coolest Elixir features - pattern matching!

How to check if an Elixir map has a given key in a guard?

Today's Advent of Code puzzle inspired me to create this TIL. It may sound trivial, but in fact, it's tricky if you are unfamiliar with the nuances of guards' functioning.