jerrygarciuh has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Well Monsigneurs,
I thought I had it but my results are not what I expected. This sub does a SELECT in the mySQL db and comes creates a hash with the day (of the month) as key and the title (of an event) as value. Thing is that some days have multiple events so I wanted to concatenate the additional titles onto the end of the existing value. The code below is where I am now. It gives me 1 title, and not the one I was getting so I am triggering the else conditional but no matter what I do (including $events{ $ref->{$day} } = undef or ="boogers" ) seem to have no effect. Can some one point out what is going wrong and how I can concatenate the values of identical keys?
TIA
jg
sub month_events {
    $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT * FROM hno_calendar WHERE year = $yea
+r AND month =    $month");
    $sth->execute();

    while (my $ref = $sth->fetchrow_hashref()) {
        if ( !exists $events{ $ref->{day} } ) {
            $events{ $ref->{day} } = $ref->{title};
        } else {
            $events{ $ref->{$day} } .=$ref->{title};
        }
    }
}

[download]
_____________________________________________________
Think a race on a horse on a ball with a fish! TG

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Concatenating Identical Key's Values
by Kanji (Parson) on Apr 04, 2002 at 04:39 UTC

    If your code was cut n' pasted, your problem probably lies in your use of $day in the else as you use day (string, not a scalar) beforehand.

    Also, you can simplify things by doing away with if/else entirely ...

    while( my $ref = $sth->fetchrow_hashref ) {
    $events{ $ref->{'day'} } .= $ref->{'title'};
}

    [download]

        --k.


[reply]
[d/l]
      Kanji++. Sometimes I feel like I must be code blind! Thanks very much!
      jg
      _____________________________________________________
      Think a race on a horse on a ball with a fish! TG
[reply]
[d/l]
        If you had used "use strict;" Perl would have caught that for you. See perldoc strict.
[reply]
        Syntax hiliting also sometimes helps to spot such things, but use strict should be used nevertheless.
[reply]
[d/l]

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