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

I have a directory tree that is being provided in the form of a flat text file.

/root/dir1/file1
/root/dir1/file2
/root/dir1/file3
/root/dir2/file1


What I would like to do is create a hash out of this information. (note: this file could be of any length and have a variable directory depth)
hash{root}{dir1}{file1} = $value (where $value is determined at run time)

My initial thought was to split each line into an array, and then use the information in node_id=196317 to turn the array into the hash. But this seems less than optimal.

What would be the best way to handle this problem?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: file tree to hash
by dakkar (Hermit) on Apr 05, 2003 at 22:15 UTC 
    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Data::Dumper;

{my $i=1;
sub makevalue {
  return $i++;
}
}

my $hash={};my $h0;
my $l;my @c;
while ($l=<DATA>) {
  $h0=$hash;
  @c=split '/',$l;
  for my $c (@c[0..$#c-1]) {
    next unless $c;
    $h0=($h0->{$c}||={});
  }
  $h0->{$c[-1]}=makevalue($l);
}

print Dumper($hash);

__DATA__
/root/dir1/file1
/root/dir1/file2
/root/dir1/file3
/root/dir2/file1

    [download]

    Outputs:

    $VAR1 = {
 'root' => {
   'dir2' => {
     'file1' => 4
    },
    'dir1' => {
      'file2' => 2,
      'file3' => 3,
      'file1' => 1
    }
  }
};

    [download]

    What does it do: it splits each row, and walks down the HoH (creating empty hashes as needed), putting the computed values (in this example just a counter) on the leaf.

    I think this is more or less what you were describing, but I can't come up with a better solution.

    -- 
        dakkar - Mobilis in mobile
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Re: file tree to hash
by pg (Canon) on Apr 06, 2003 at 00:09 UTC
    This is one way, less conventional: 
    use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my %hash;
while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    s/\//}{/g;
    eval "\$hash".substr($_,1,length)."} = undef";
}
print Dumper(\%hash);

__DATA__
/root/dir1/file1
/root/dir1/file2
/root/dir1/file3
/root/dir2/file1

    [download]
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Re: file tree to hash
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Apr 05, 2003 at 22:09 UTC

    That's how I would do it. Why does it seem less than optimal? What do you mean by "best"?

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Re: file tree to hash
by DrManhattan (Chaplain) on Apr 06, 2003 at 02:40 UTC

    Here's another eval() solution.

    #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my %hash;
my $value = "determined at run time";
while (<DATA>)
{
    chomp;
    eval '$hash{'
        . join(
            "}{",
            split(/\//)
        )
        . "} = '$value'";
}

print Dumper(\%hash);

__DATA__
root/dir1/file1
root/dir1/file2
root/dir1/file3
root/dir2/file1

    [download]
    Edit: merlyn is correct. Don't ever use this. A file named "root/dir1/file1}=1;`someprogram`;$hash{foo" could be used to execute an external program.

    -Matt

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