Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, Second Edition

Day 5. Working with Hashes

Arrays and lists provide a basic way of grouping together scalars, but they're pretty basic as far as data structures go. Perl provides a second form of list data (or a third, if you count raw lists) called hashes. In many situations—depending on the data you've got and what you want to do with it—hashes are better than arrays for storing and accessing data.

Today, then, we'll cover hashes. You'll learn all about

• How hashes are different from arrays

• Defining hashes

• Accessing hash elements

• Hashes and context

• Using split to split a string into a list (or hash).

• Still more patterns