I THINK that this works. I would like to verify and get some suggestions to improve performance.

I have a file that contains hundreds of lines that look like this: 
Item1--Item2--Item3
ItemX--Item2--ItemA
Item1--ItemV--Item3--Item4

[download]
These lines can have any number of items in them. I need to put these into a hash to work with. The approach i am taking is to build each one into a hash reference and then merge it into the main hash.


This is the code that I have so far: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $datafile = "data.txt";

open(FILE,$datafile);
foreach my $line (<FILE>) {

    #Kill linefeeds/returns. Data generated on variety of OS's
    $line =~ s/\n//g;
    $line =~ s/\r//g;

    my @items = split(/--/,$line);

    my $foo = &bhash(\%shash,@items);

    @shash{keys %$foo} = values %$foo;
    
}
close(FILE);

print Dumper \%shash;

sub bhash {
    my($hash,@keys )= @_;
    my $ref= \$hash;
    map($ref= \$$ref->{$_}, @keys);

    return $$ref;
}

[download]
This seems kind of clunky and error prone to me though.

In reply to Generating Hashes from arrays of arbitrary size by Anonymous Monk

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