in reply to Initializing a hash table

Could you post a snippet of code that shows what you're currently doing? I would think that at the time when you print out the results, you could just print "0" if you detect that no entries exist. Depending on how you're building the hash, "detecting no entries" could mean using exists, or defined, or scalar keys %{$hash{'key'}}, or something else.

-- Mike

--
XML::Simpler does not require XML::Parser or a SAX parser. It does require File::Slurp.
-- grantm, perldoc XML::Simpler

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom