Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, Second Edition

Summary

Today, we completed your background in list data with a discussion of hashes, which are similar to arrays and lists except that they arrange data into keys and values as opposed to simply storing elements in a numeric order. You learned about the hash variable %hash, and how to look up a value using hash access $hash{'key'}. You also learned how to delete keys from the hash, and how to process each element of a hash using a foreach loop and the keys function. We finished up with some discussion about the split function, and you learned about a few more patterns for pattern matching.

The built-in functions you learned about today include (see the perlfunc man page for more details about these functions):

• delete takes a hash key as an argument ...