in reply to Randomly reassign hash keys

G'day cormanaz,

"I can imagine how to do that in an inelegant way, but was wondering if there is an elegant way."

How about:

@hash{sort keys %hash} = values %hash;

That uses the inherent randomness of both keys and values. The documentation for both of those functions includes the same sentence:

"Hash entries are returned in an apparently random order."

I ran a quick test from the command line:

$ perl -MData::Dump -e 'my %x = qw{a 1 b 2 c 3}; dd \%x; @x{sort keys +%x} = values %x; dd \%x'

As you would expect, all tests output this as the first line:

{ a => 1, b => 2, c => 3 }

Here's the second line from three runs:

{ a => 1, b => 2, c => 3 } { a => 1, b => 3, c => 2 } { a => 2, b => 3, c => 1 }

By the way, I also tried just:

@hash{keys %hash} = values %hash;

However, that doesn't change anything. The documentation for both keys and values also contains this same sentence:

"So long as a given hash is unmodified you may rely on keys, values and each to repeatedly return the same order as each other."

— Ken