Hello cmikel, and welcome to the Monastery!

As NetWallah says, you need to chomp the keyboard input string before using it as a hash key. NetWallah’s proposed OO design, using a House class as a container for Room objects, is a good approach. However, your original design can also be made to work with a few tweaks:

#! perl
use strict;
use warnings;

package Room
{
    sub new
    {
        my $class = shift;
        my $self  = {
                        id     => shift,
                        name   => shift,
                        detail => shift,
                    };

        return bless $self, $class;
    }
}

my %houserooms =
(
    kitchen => Room->new(1, 'kitchen', 'sleek and modern'),
    den     => Room->new(2, 'den',     'board games and more'),
);

print "\nEnter room (or \"quit\"):\n";
chomp(my $roomcmd = <>);

while ($roomcmd ne 'quit')
{
    print $houserooms{$roomcmd}->{detail} // "$roomcmd not found";
    print "\n\nEnter room (or \"quit\"):\n";
    chomp($roomcmd = <>);
}

[download]

Typical output:

18:22 >perl 607_SoPW.pl

Enter room (or "quit"):
kitchen
sleek and modern

Enter room (or "quit"):
den
board games and more

Enter room (or "quit"):
bedroom
bedroom not found

Enter room (or "quit"):
quit

18:23 >

[download]

Note that an object is a blessed reference, so there is no need to use syntax like this:

%houserooms = (
kitchen  =>  {
    House->new("1","kitchen","sleek and modern")
},
...
);

[download]

which takes a House object (already a reference!), puts it into another (anonymous) hash, and stores a reference to that hash as the value corresponding to the “kitchen” key in the hash %houserooms.

See perlreftut, perlref, perlootut, and perlobj.

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

In reply to Re: Use Objects as Hash Values? by Athanasius
in thread Use Objects as Hash Values? by cmikel

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