You're right, it can take a lot of memory. If you're concerned about it, use a tied DBM file. My experience with them is light, but from what I remember, at least one of them handles nested hashes. Also, I don't see why looking for //bananna would take long at all. If you've got all of your stuff in a hash, a simple print "found banana" if $hash{banana} would suffice, I think. Or, if you want it to be even cleaner, you could do something like this: 
$hash{/banana} = 1.35;
$hash{/banana/shake} = 1.48;

$value = value("banana", "shake");

sub value
{
   my $key = join "/", @_;
   return $hash{/$key};
}

[download]
Like I said, though, I don't know anything about XPath, so I might be talking out of my hind quarter...:)

thor

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Idea for XPath implementation by thor
in thread Idea for XPath implementation by Jaap

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.