SAMS Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours THIRD EDITION

Getting Data Out of a Hash

As you have seen, to retrieve a single value from a hash, simply use a $, the name of the hash, and (in curly braces) the key whose value you want to retrieve. Now consider this example:

%Movies = ( 'The Shining' => 'Kubrick', 'Ten Commandments' => 'DeMille', Goonies =>
 'Spielberg');
print $Movies{'The Shining'};

These lines print the value associated with the key The Shining in the hash %Movies. This example would print Kubrick.

Sometimes examining all the elements of a hash is useful. If all the keys of the hash are known, you can access them individually by key as shown previously. Most of the time, though, accessing ...