Hey monks. I'm having a stab at writing my first OO module. All is going well, and I'm enjoying it, but I have stumbled upon a problem. The underlying hash of my object has a sub-hash, so to speak, called 'options'. (When I bless it, it's like this:)

bless {foo => 'bar',
             options => {anoption      => 1,
                                     anotheroption => 'foo',
                                     option3 => 'barbar'},
             bar => 'maz'}, $class;

[download]

The options hash has a lot of keys, so I thought I could write a subroutine to return an element. Here's my try:

sub option { shift->{options}->{shift()} }

All goes well, until I have to modify a value in the options hash. I'm sure there's a very simple way to do this. I tried this:

sub option {
    my $self = shift;
    if (scalar @_ == 1) {
        return $self->{options}->{shift()};
    } else {
        my ($key, $value) = @_;
        $self->{options}->{$key} = $value;
        }
}

[download]
This works, but looks cumbersome. There has to be an easier way to do it. I think I need to be clearer on hash assignment in general, as well. I always thought that you say this:

%hash = @array

and the pairs described by @array would be added to %hash, instead of wiping the hash and then adding them. This doesn't happen, and the only way I can think of accomplishing the same thing is to divide the array into two array based on modulo 2, to get the effective keys and values, then using a hash slice to assign them. Again, very cumbersome. I'm sure many OO modules have done this, but I searched for examples in vain. An example, preferably supporting changing of more than one element, would be great.

--
my one true love

In reply to setting and retrieving sub-hash elements in an object by Amoe

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