You've got a good answer above if you're going to stick to arrays, but I'd prefer to use hashes, so I could use meaningful keys (rather than having to remember 0 = English, 1 = color, etc.) Something like this:

my %display = (
    english => {
        red => 'red', blue => 'blue', yellow => 'yellow'
    },
    spanish => {
        red => 'rojo', blue => 'azul', yellow => 'amarillo'
    },
    french => {
        red => 'rouge', blue => 'vert', yellow => 'jaune'
        # vert is green, but I forgot the word for blue ;-)
    }
}

[download]
This is English-centric, but of course you could use any other language for the keys. Another nice thing with this is that you can add and delete values for one language without worrying about the order in the others.

Furthermore, once you have a language selected, you can get a reference to just one subhash and use that from there on. Like this: 

my $scr_display = $display{spanish};
print  $scr_display->{red}, "\n";      # prints rojo

# Now switch to a different language
$scr_display = $display{french};
print $scr_display->{red}, "\n";       # prints rouge

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(Just to clarify, you can do the "language selection" thing with arrays too, it just doesn't look as nice.) Note that hashes take more space than arrays, which could be a concern if you have huge lists of words.

You can find out more about nested data structures in Perl data structures cookbook.

In reply to Re: Do I need an array within an array by VSarkiss
in thread Do I need an array within an array by meetn2veg

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