SPUG: Lottery Analyzer

[Michael]

Hello,

I am trying to write a little lotto analyzer, just for self-indulgence.
I'm not really trying to win Lotto, but just using it as an interesting
excuse to increase my perl exposure.  If I win, bonus!

Here's what I have so far:

A text file containing WA Lotto results back to 1999.  Each line in the
file contains date (MMM-DD-YYYY) followed by whitespace followed by first
picked number followed by whitespace follwed by second picked number, etc.

Example:

Jan-16-1999  12 14 16 33 35 45
Jan-13-1999  2  25 32 35 41 45
Jan-09-1999  3  10 11 12 19 35
Jan-06-1999  19 24 32 37 41 42
Jan-02-1999  3  8  20 36 38 39

Here's the code I have so far:

##!/usr/bin/perl -w
#open(DATA, "< lottery.txt");
#
#while (<DATA>) {
#chomp;
#s/\s+/:/g;
#@line=split(':', $_);
## print "$line[0]\n";
#print "@line\n";
## $line{$line[0]}=$line[1..6];
#}
#close(DATA);
----------------------------------

I'm looking more for help with techniques and references rather than just
code examples but I'll appreciate any advice/help offered.

I want to start by finding the most often occurring numbers, but I'm
pretty new to programming, and don't really know how to go about doing it.
I suspect I'll need to use a hash or two, but I don't know where to start.

After finding the most often occurring numbers, I'll probably want to look
into the numbers between the numbers.  Finding things like the average
span between numbers; stuff like that.

Can any of you offer advice on the data structures I'll need to work with?
If I win, I'll give SPUG a million :)  I'd really only be able to handle
1-2 million by myself.

digigasm at freeshell.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org


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