Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Generation of a Hash of Hashes

Here are some techniques for populating a hash of hashes. To read from a file with the following format:

flintstones: husband=fred pal=barney wife=wilma pet=dino

you could use either of the following two loops:

while ( <> ) {
    next unless s/^(.*?):\s*//;
    $who = $1;
    for $field ( split ) {
        ($key, $value) = split /=/, $field;
        $HoH{$who}{$key} = $value;
    }
}

while ( <> ) {
    next unless s/^(.*?):\s*//;
    $who = $1;
    $rec = {};
    $HoH{$who} = $rec;
    for $field ( split ) {
        ($key, $value) = split /=/, $field;
        $rec–>{$key} = $value;
    }
}

If you have a subroutine get_family that returns a list of key/value pairs, you can use it to stuff %HoH with either of these three snippets:

for $group ( "simpsons", "jetsons", "flintstones" ) {
    $HoH{$group} = { get_family($group) };
}

for $group ( "simpsons", "jetsons", "flintstones" ) {
    @members = get_family($group);
    $HoH{$group} = { @members };
}

sub hash_families {
    my @ret;
    for $group ( @_ ) {
        push @ret, $group, { get_family($group) };
    }
    return @ret;
}
%HoH = hash_families( "simpsons", "jetsons", "flintstones" );

You can append new members to an existing hash like so:

%new_folks = (
    wife => "wilma",
    pet  => "dino";
);
for $what (keys %new_folks) {
    $HoH{flintstones}{$what} = $new_folks{$what};
}