I have various items stored in a hash with the price as the key:

my %ITEMS = (
    29.95 => 'item 1', 
    38.55 => 'item 2', 
    45.20 => 'item 3',  # Oh oh!
    58.29 => 'item 4', 
);

[download]

If you must know, the "items" are really subscription orders for a magazine, so there is no chance that two "items" would have the same price.

The problem comes when you want to access the hash.

print $_, "\n" foreach (keys %ITEMS);

__OUTPUT__
58.29
38.55
45.2
29.95

[download]

When accessed in numeric context, the '45.20' key drops the trailing zero, but keeps it in string context. The solution I came up with was to have two entries pointing to the same string, one in numeric context and the other in string:

my %ITEMS = (
    29.95   => 'item 1', 
    38.55   => 'item 2', 
    "45.20" => 'item 3', # String 
    45.2    => 'item 3', # Number
    58.29   => 'item 4', 
);

print $_, "\n" foreach (keys %ITEMS);

__OUTPUT__
58.29
38.55
45.2
45.20
29.95

[download]

This solution forces you to update two hardcoded hash keys with identicial data.

Does anybody see a cleaner solution?

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

In reply to Floats with trailing zeros as a hash key by hardburn

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