Nice question :) I had a play using the lovely AUTOLOAD. 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

our $AUTOLOAD;

our $hashref = {
              'a' => {
                      'b' => {
                              'c' => 'this is c',
                              'd' => 'this is d'
                              }
                      }
              };

print "a_b_c() = ".a_b_c()."\n";
print "a_b_d() = ".a_b_d()."\n";
exit(0);

sub AUTOLOAD {
    my ($package,$ref_name) = split /::/, $AUTOLOAD;
    my $ref = '$hashref'. join '', map { "->{$_}" } grep /^\w+$/, spli
+t /_/, $ref_name;
    return eval $ref;
}

# output for above is:

a_b_c() = this is c
a_b_d() = this is d

[download]

.02

cLive ;-)

In reply to Re: quick question about hash element access by cLive ;-)
in thread quick question about hash element access by glwtta

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