Hi Rolf!

Your approach implies that the data is essentially analog to a DB table.
But you are losing the possibility to index the data by "zip" (?) or "state" with a hash lookup.

My approach not only implies a "flat", "de-normalized" DB table, that is what it is. This will work great for a few ten's of thousands of lines. I am not "losing the possibility to index by "zip"". When you get to say 100,000K+ lines, then I would recommend a DB like SQLite. Let the DB take care of indexing. There are to be sure a lot of "if's, and's and but's" with a DB. However the OP's data structure does not appear to me to be efficient.

From what I can tell, the use of the "zip" as a primary key doesn't make any sense. And the OP's hash structure is hard to search and inefficient. Yes, I do think that 1 loop is easier to understand than 3 loops.
Cheers, Marshall

In reply to Re^3: Get all hash value into array by Marshall
in thread Get all hash value into array by Magnolia25

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.