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 create and use custom shell commands?

Each of us had a situation, where we had to invoke a few, same commands each time. Making it once is not that problematic, but when we are supposed to repeat given operations, it may be better just to create one function that will handle it all.

How to deal with timeout issue when debugging Phoenix app

There is a common scenario: You'd like to debug your Phoenix app with break!/4 or IEx.pry/0. Everything works fine, until... Phoenix server throws a timeout error statement.

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.