Something I've heard and seen are people using anonymous hashes and arrays and because up to this point I never came across a reason to use them, this is all new to me.

I read a few tutorials online, LP3 doesn't seem to mention it and the Perl Cookbook has a small section on it I've read but I have a few questions.

Is an anonymous hash also known as a multi-dimensional hash where you can literally have different hashes inside of a single hash?

The problem I am trying to get through is creating a mess of hashes on the fly and add records to them without having to create 150 or so different hash names.

An example of what I am trying to do would be a set of hashes for each meta tag (see below). This would be for EACH meta tag. Now in the real world, I don't want to manually create a hash for each possible meta tag.

     Meta tag name
     Meta tag value
     Meta tag character count
     Meta tag word count
     Meta tag word repeat count
[download]

Real example:

    Title
    Welcome to my website!
    22
    4
    1
    
    Keywords
    candy, food, pop, candy cane, soda, caffeine
    31
    5
    2
[download]

This isn't what I'm really trying to do with it but this seemed to be the best way to explain what I am trying to do. I have hundreds of separate hashes I need to create dynamically and store values into and someone mentioned anonymous hashes and arrays are the way to go.

An example from http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-5.8.5/pod/perlref.pod:

    $hashref = {
        'Adam'  => 'Eve',
        'Clyde' => 'Bonnie',
    };
[download]

This doesn't look like anything more than single key/value pairs and I don't see examples on how to do what this script requires.

How practical are anonymous hashes and arrays? This is the first time I've ever had to do them and it's because I need dynamic hashes created without needing to create new hashes. Is the primary use for these to create arrays or hashes dynamically?

Thanks for your help wise monks.