in reply to Syntax for partly associative arrays

Wouchw! That question didn't display like you typed, huh?   I think you meant $a[1]{"blue"} and $a[$i][$j]?   Is that right?

Anyway, if you had a list of words to use you would still use foreach like so: 

  my  @words = qw( red blue peony );
  for my $i ( 1.. $n ) {
    foreach my $w ( @words ) {
      print "  I see '$a[$i]{$w}'\n";
    }
  }

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Re: Re: Syntax for partly associative arrays
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 08, 2003 at 14:23 UTC
    Thanks to you all. I think I have less knowledge than you're asuming. Yes, I meant what shenme said; I don't know how to make square brackets display (now I do - put them inside code tags). I tried what fletcher suggested, and it worked, but I still don't know how to refer to the first variable inside the second loop. When I run 
    #!/usr/bin/perl
$a[1]{"blue"}=1;
$a[1]{"red"}=2;
$a[2]{"blue"}=3;
$a[2]{"red"}=4;
foreach $hash (@a)
    {
    foreach $word (keys %$hash)
        {
    print $firstval." ".$word." ".$hash->{$word}."\n";
        }
    }

I'd like to see 
1 blue 1
1 red 2
2 blue 3
2 red 4

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    but I don't know how to set $firstval to see that. I understand the idea of arrays and references (is a hash an array of references?), but I know only by rote when to use @, $, and % for arrays (and %$ is new to me). So does this mean that anytime a multidimensional array is partly associative, I have to use foreach for all loops on it? I thought there was a way to use for $i (1..n) for the numerical variables and foreach for the others, but I don't remember it. Phil Rennert
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[d/l]
      Looking again, I think shenme answered my question, -if- I have a list of all the words the second variable can be, which I can make if I need to. But it seems awkward, especially since the word lists for $i=1, $i=2, etc. aren't identical. I can union the lists and put in a does-not-exist test; but it seems kludgey: is there a cleaner way?
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