I have a program that will output the keys and values of a hash: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
%testhash = (
        "label1" => "220",
        "label2" => "221",
        "label3" => "222",
        "label4" => "223",
);
open (CCOL, ">ccol")
|| die "Cannot create ccol\n";
while (($key,$value)=each %testhash) {
        print CCOL "s/{$key}/$value/g\n";
}
close (CCOL);

[download]
What I want is to be able to get this same result by reading in an external file with paired keys/ values.

My questions:
what's the best format for the external file?
How do I get it to read in in such a way that my output file does not have a bunch of extra line breaks in it?

I'm really new at this-- thanks in advance for the help. I have been reading perl books all day-- I know there's a simple solution but it is escaping me. Thanks

edited: Thu Jan 8 03:08:48 2004 by jeffa - code tags, formatting

In reply to using an external file as a hash by Anonymous Monk

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