Passing a hash into a subroutine

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

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Passing a hash into a subroutine by davido (Cardinal) on Jan 08, 2004 at 09:06 UTC
I'm not familiar with "Converter.pm". You probably need to pass the hash by reference. It could even be an anonymous hash, in which case, your syntax is very close. You just need the anonymous hash constructor: `my $status = $document->convert( { 'MIME-Type' => 'application/ms-word', 'Input' => '[In file]', 'Output' => '[Out file] } );` [download] Dave	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Passing a hash into a subroutine by chimni (Pilgrim) on Jan 08, 2004 at 08:50 UTC
Suggest you pass a reference to a hash and iterate over the keys to extract the value. `&callsub(\%hash); sub callsub { my($ref)=@_; foreach my $key(keys %$ref){ print $ref->{$key}; } }` [download] Also suggest you get a copy of the "Perl cookbook" .Very handy for such day to day problems HTH. chimni	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Passing a hash into a subroutine by tune (Curate) on Jan 08, 2004 at 08:55 UTC
You should provide the code where you are trying to collect the values of the hash. It is very hard to find one's error until the code is remaining hidden. Here is a tip until you do that: `#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use Data::Dumper; convert ( 'MIME-Type' => 'application/ms-word', 'Input' => '[In file]', 'Output' => '[Out file]' ); sub convert { my %hash = @_; # show the full thing print Dumper(\%hash); # or just one value print $hash{'Output'},"\n"; }` [download] I prefer passing hashrefs though... -- tune	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Passing a hash into a subroutine by hmerrill (Friar) on Jan 08, 2004 at 13:46 UTC
Others have pointed this out already, but I'll try to explain a little more. The safest way to pass hashes is to pass-by-reference, or pass a reference to the hash instead of passing the hash itself. You could do this: `use Converter; my $document = new Converter; my %convert_args_hash = ( 'MIME-Type' => 'application/ms-word', 'Input' => '[In file]', 'Output' => '[Out file]' ); my $convert_args_hashref = \%convert_args_hash; my $status = $document->convert($convert_args_hashref);` [download] Or you could do as someone already suggested and use the anonymous hash constructor curly braces (which creates a reference to an anonymous hash), like this: `my $status = $document->convert( { 'MIME-Type' => 'application/ms-word', 'Input' => '[In file]', 'Output' => '[Out file]' } );` [download] and then in the "convert" method (subroutine) you would just accept the hashref as the one and only argument, something like this: `sub convert { my $args_hashref = shift; print "The MIME-Type parameter = $args_hashref->{'MIME-Type'}\n" +; ### blah blah ### } # end sub convert` [download] Hopefully you get the idea. HTH.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Passing a hash into a subroutine by BUU (Prior) on Jan 08, 2004 at 10:05 UTC
`sub new { my $package = shift; # implicitly passed by the new package syntax my %opts = @_; print $opt{foo}; }` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Passing a hash into a subroutine by ysth (Canon) on Jan 08, 2004 at 14:18 UTC
There may be some confusion going on here. Will users of your Converter module actually have the parameters stored in a hash variable? Or do you just want to have your routine take "named parameters"? Most of the replies seem to have assumed the former, so for completeness I will assume the latter. Sample code: `sub convert { # Since this is an object method, the object is passed as first arg +; my $self = shift; # now load the rest of the args into a hash my %arg = @_; if ($arg{"MIME-Type"} eq "application/ms-word") { install_openofficedotorg() ... }` [download] There are some problems with this. If the caller passes an odd number of parameters, you'll get a warning on that = @_ assignment statement. It also is hard to catch typos in the parameter names, e.g. MIME_Type => "application/ms-word" would get silently ignored, because it has _ instead of -. There are several modules, such as Params::Validate that help out when dealing with named parameters.	[reply] [d/l]