in reply to Massive expansion of a hash of arrays?

If the data-structure being traversed is deep and/or arbitrary, perhaps a tool such as Data::Walker will come in handy.   (There are many tools of this sort on CPAN ...)

These tools, as the name implies, allow you to “walk through” a data structure in a predictable way, regardless of its depth.   Might or might not be apropos in this particular situation, but worth knowing about anyhow.

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Re^2: Massive expansion of a hash of arrays?
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 17, 2014 at 23:02 UTC

    Thanks im reading up on it now. Meanwhile, i'd like to understand recursion better as this is the first ive come across it and it looks immensely useful for the future.

    Conceptually it seems simple enough, a function calling itself but i cant get my head around the details of what the code is doing!

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      I recommend you start with the Wikipedia article titled Recursion (computer science). And because "recursion is one of the central ideas of computer science," you're going to find explanations and examples of it in any good computer science textbook.

      If you have an arbitrarily nested data structure with both arrays and hashes in it, then you're going to need to use the ref function. You'll use an if-then-else construct within your recursive function to decide what to do at each level in the nested data structure.

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