As noted before you almost never want to do it the way you described. Hash slice syntax is what you want. 

my %h;
my @cols = qw( a b c d );

@h{@cols} = split ' ', 'does this do it?';

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper \%h;
__DATA__
$VAR1 = {
          'a' => 'does',
          'b' => 'this',
          'c' => 'do',
          'd' => 'it?'
        };

[download]

If you designed this database it is worth noting that each column in a RDBMS should be atomic ie you should not be storing pipe delimited data and then breaking it out as you loose a lot of power.

cheers

tachyon

In reply to Re^5: getting the name of a variable to use as string by tachyon
in thread getting the name of a variable to use as string by pmneve

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