Erlang - Working With Ets:select_count

In my last post, I covered using guards with Erlang’s ETS select/2 functionality.

However, what if you’re looking to select a count of the number of matches for a given pattern? Lets use select_count for that.

You can use the same pattern matching I covered in my previous post.

There’s some weird behavior though, with the last parameter of the Result part of the record. It seems that using ‘$$’ returns 0. Instead, it looks like you need to use true.

1> Tmp = ets:new(bob, []). 38 2> ets:insert(Tmp, {bob, 3}). true 3> ets:select_count(Tmp, [{ {bob, ‘$1’}, [{ ‘>’, ‘$1’, 0}], [true]}]). 1 4> ets:select_count(Tmp, [{ {bob, ‘$1’}, [{ ‘>’, ‘$1’, 0}], [’$$’]}]). 0