Hello monks,

I am trying to split a string based on white space elements and assign key value to a hash.

That would be easy if key value where even and not odd.

Sample of code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my $str = "one 1 two 2 three 3 odd_element";
my %hash = split / /, $str;

print Dumper \%hash;
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Sample of output:

Odd number of elements in hash assignment at test.pl line 7.
$VAR1 = {
          'three' => '3',
          'one' => '1',
          'odd_element' => undef,
          'two' => '2'
        };
[download]

So I tried to split it into an array and the convert the array to a hash (overkill for no reason), but it gives the possibility to play with the array elements before assign it to hash.

Sample of code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my %hash;
my $str = "one 1 two 2 three 3 odd_element";
my @array = split / /, $str;

while (@array) {
    my $key = shift @array;
    my $value = shift @array;
    if (defined $key && defined $value) {
    $hash{$key} = $value;
    }
    else {
    $hash{$key} = undef;
    }
}

print Dumper \%hash;
[download]

Sample of output:

$VAR1 = {
          'odd_element' => undef,
          'one' => '1',
          'two' => '2',
          'three' => '3'
        };
[download]

It is working fine but there must be some internal function or another way to over come this overkill process.

So the question, is there any better way that I should come up with?

Thanks in advance everyone for their time and effort.