How to count identical string elements in a Ruby array

Question

I have the following Array = [\"Jason\", \"Jason\", \"Teresa\", \"Judah\", \"Michelle\", \"Judah\", \"Judah\", \"Allison\"]

How do I produce a count for

Answer 1

Lots of great implementations here.

But as a beginner I would consider this the easiest to read and implement

names = ["Jason", "Jason", "Teresa", "Judah", "Michelle", "Judah", "Judah", "Allison"]

name_frequency_hash = {}

names.each do |name|
  count = names.count(name)
  name_frequency_hash[name] = count  
end
#=> {"Jason"=>2, "Teresa"=>1, "Judah"=>3, "Michelle"=>1, "Allison"=>1}

The steps we took:

• we created the hash
• we looped over the names array
• we counted how many times each name appeared in the names array
• we created a key using the name and a value using the count

It may be slightly more verbose (and performance wise you will be doing some unnecessary work with overriding keys), but in my opinion easier to read and understand for what you want to achieve