I am trying to get all object oriented with my latest 'little' perl script. to do this, I am parsing some xml, looking for different object types. When I find the object name, I instantiate the object and in the constructor, I look for the various tags in each object, and then store them in the $self array hash. So far, so good. Here is a sample object: 
<ObjectType>
   <AppObject>hello</AppObject>
   <AppObjectField>gender</AppObjectField>
   <valueTargetPair value="MALE" targetPo="Incoming 1" />
   <valueTargetPair value="FEMALE" targetPo="Incoming 2" />
</ObjectType>

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I do things like: ... 
}elsif ($_ =~ /<AppObjectField>(.*)<\/AppObjectField>/) {
   $self->{appObjFld} = $1;
}

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... no problem. my problem is the more complicated <valueTargetPair> tag. I parse the values for the value and target labels into $1 and $2. I want to put these two things into a hash with two entries, having value and targetPo as the keys. Now, because I have several valueTargetPair tags, I need to put this has into an array! I do all of that like this: 
if ($inline =~ /<valueTargetPair (.*)\/>/) {
   if ($inline =~ /value=\"(.*?)\" targetPo=\"(.*?)\"/) {
      my %theHash = {value=>$1, targetPo=>$2};
      push (@arry, \%theHash);
   }
}

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then, to keep it in my $self object, I do something like: 
   $self->{valuePair} = \@arry;

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To summarize, I parse some xml (not really important that it is xml), and put some of the results into a hash. I store the hashes in an array, which I then need to store in another hash! This leaves me with a hash holding an array holding hashes. I think that the above is all okish My problem, is that later on, I run a method to print out the contents. pulling the simple values (like $self->{appObjFld} ) out of the $self hash is easy. getting that value Pair stuff out is murder. How can I pull out the original %theHash, so that I can print each valueTargetPair?


...regan

In reply to hashes, arrays, and references... oh my by regan

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