I am trying to organize a get together of people from my singing group using a CGI script. The optimum solution is to find the day where most people can attend from a choice of the days given.

At the beginning of the script I read in the relevant data from a file and then add the data collected. This is stored in a hash that contains a list of people that can't attend(value) on any day (key) (in the interests of politeness I want to store thier names so that if there isn't a day where everyone can attend we can at least let people know who can't come)

I then want to create a hash whose key is the day and whose value is the number of people who can't attend. My solution is below but my question is can I do this by using scalar on the hash value directly without creating the unecessary array?

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

# %hash1=("key1"=>"value1","key2"=>"value2");
%cant_make_day =(
         "Mon"=>"Jim",
         "Tues"=>"Jim, Paul",         
         "Weds"=>"Jim, Paul, Annie" # real people!
         );

while (($elim_key,$elim_value) = each %cant_make_day)
  {
 # is this array necessary?
    @array= split /,/, $cant_make_day{$elim_key};
    $length=@array;

# sets value to length of array stored in hash
    $which_day{$elim_key}=scalar @array; 
print "The number of people on $elim_key = $which_day{$elim_key}\n";
  }
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