Zaxo's answer is good if you don't need to know which key had a value that matched. In general, you loop over a hash in one of these ways: 
for my $value (values %hash) {
   # do something with $value
}

for my $key (keys %hash) {
   # do something with $key and $hash{$key}
}

# same as above, but sorted by value (or whatever)
for my $key (sort { $hash{$a} cmp $hash{$b} } keys %hash) {
}

# with a while loop, you can bail out early without having
# loaded all the keys on the stack up front; may be
# more efficient for a large hash, or one tied to a dbm file.
while (my $key = each %hash) {
   # note that there's an implicit defined() on the above assignment,
   # so the while loop continues to until each() returns undef
   # even if there are "0" or "" keys

   # do something with $key and $hash{$key}
}

# same as above, but go ahead and let list-context each
# give both the key and the value
while (my ($key, $value) = each %hash) {
   # above is a list assignment in scalar context, which evaluates to
   # the number of elements on the right of the assignment.
   # as long as each returns more data, the assignment will evaluate t
+o 2 (true)
   # When the end is reached, each returns an empty list so the assign
+ment
   # evaluates to 0.

   # do something with $key and $value
}

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In reply to Re: Iterating over hash contents? by ysth
in thread Iterating over hash contents? by Spidy

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