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Newsgroups: comp.graphics.apps.gnuplot
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2012 09:12:55 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: Re: Histogram for irregular data
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On Wednesday, October 17, 2012 2:25:25 AM UTC-7, Hermann Peifer wrote:
> 
> With a reasonable data file size, I would pre-process the data on the 
> fly, perhaps in this way:  
> 
> plot "<( awk '{a[$1]=a[$1] FS $2}END{for (i in a) print i, a[i]}' file 
> )" using ...
> 
> The above AWK one-liner prints your sample data like this:
> 
> IL  2
> OH  3 1
> WA  1 2 1
> 

Thanks. That is what I was trying to avoid... but I guess its workable. What would the rest of that plot line look like for an unknown/variable number of columns? Or should I use the zero fill trick and count the number of column during pre-processing?