Actually I would want the flexibility of hashes instead of arrays. With hashes, you don't need 2004 elements to represent the year as a human-readable number. The 14th day can be called '14' instead of '13' (arrays are zero-indexed). And months could be expressed as either their numeric representation or their actual name. In addition to that, a hash would make it easier to put season breaks partway through months. 
$weather_archive{'2003'}{'Spring'}{'Apr'}{'15'}{'High'} = '70f';
$weather_archive{'2003'}{'Spring'}{'Apr'}{'15'}{'Low'} = '43f';

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Or like this: 
%weather_archive = ( 2003 => {
                         Spring => {
                             April => {
                                 15 => {
                                     High => '70f',
                                     Low  => '43f',
                                     Wind => 'NW15kt',
                                     Bar  => '29.85+'
                                 }
                             }
                         },
                      2004 => ......,
                     );

[download]
With that info to mull over in your mind, I wouldn't take it much further without consulting perlref and perlreftut. The latter is really a great place to start planting seeds of understanding of complex data structures.

Dave


"If I had my life to do over again, I'd be a plumber." -- Albert Einstein

In reply to Re: 3D array of hashes by davido
in thread 3D array of hashes by ManyCrows

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