Beg to differ, %PhoneBook is lexical, but it's declared lexically for the scope of the entire program (at the top of the page).

Yes, there are betters ways to do it! dmtelf, I would definitely try something like this:

our %PhoneBook = &ReadPhoneBookFile();

sub ReadPhoneBookFile {
   my %TempBook;
   ... some stuff ...
   return %TempBook;
}

[download]

This would have been much more clearer, and our* is the best keyword for global variables like that (a variable used between subroutines without explicitly being passed). HTH :-)

Alakaboo

* I should clarify this. use vars has been somewhat depreciated in favor of our since Perl5.6.0. Since it will no doubt be used prevalently henceforth, and in Perl6, I make it a general rule to use it. If you're running an older version of Perl, you'll need to do:

use vars qw(%PhoneBook); %PhoneBook = &ReadPhoneBookFile();

It's just cleaner to use our! (thanks tilly, ya beat me to it!)

In reply to RE: RE: Data extraction from hash problem by mwp
in thread Data extraction from hash problem by dmtelf

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