Hello again Monks,

Lately I have been bombing the forum with questions but no matter how much I experiment with my code I can not figure out the solution(s) to my problems this is why I keep asking questions over and over.

To the question, I have a hash of hashes with hundreds values on each hash. I want to use a negative condition on both detecting white space character or non printable character. In such a case I want to delete the element from the hash (if does not contain white space character or non printable character).

I tried the conditions separately and they work just fine, at least based on my experimentation examples. I need to combine them in a nested if because a value with no spaces it does not mean that it does not contain special characters.

Based on my research in order to detect non printable characters you can use either this /[^[:print:]]/g or this /[^[:ascii:]]/ regex expression found here (Finding out non ASCII Characters in the text)

Sample of code:

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

my $str = 'a[bdy]dfjaPÑsdafÜ';
my $str_2 = 'WAP';

my $hoh_ref = {
    hash_1 => { a => 'a[bdy]dfjaPÑsdafÜ',
        b => 'WAP' },
    hash_2 => { c => 'Te st' }
};

print Dumper $hoh_ref;

foreach my $key (sort keys %{$hoh_ref}) {
    foreach my $value (keys %{$$hoh_ref{$key}}) {
    # If not white space character or non printable character remove e
+lement
    if ($$hoh_ref{$key}{$value} !~ /[^[:print:]]/g ||
        $$hoh_ref{$key}{$value} !~ /\s/) {
        delete $$hoh_ref{$key}{$value};
    }
    elsif ($$hoh_ref{$key}{$value} =~ /[^[:print:]]/g) {
        while ($$hoh_ref{$key}{$value} =~ /[^[:print:]]/g) {
        print "Non Printable Characater:\t$&\n";
        }
    }
    }
}

print Dumper $hoh_ref;

__END__
$VAR1 = {
          'hash_2' => {
                        'c' => 'Te st'
                      },
          'hash_1' => {
                        'b' => 'WAP',
                        'a' => 'a[bdy]dfjaPÑsdafÜ'
                      }
        };
$VAR1 = {
          'hash_2' => {},
          'hash_1' => {}
        };
[download]

Desired output would be:

$VAR1 = {
          'hash_2' => {
                        'c' => 'Te st'
                      },
          'hash_1' => {
                        'a' => 'a[bdy]dfjaPÑsdafÜ'
                      }
        };
[download]

Thanks in advance for your time and effort.