I can buy your arguments if we're talking about completely general nested data structure access, but that's not what I'm after. I really do have a deeply nested structure, which I am completely specifying -- so I have no worries about $location or $b containing the separator, because they're field names. My values could very well have weird characters in them, but I'll never have anything unexpected in the "path" of a value. (True, a field name like $location could easily be coming from an external source, but I have to scrub them for sanity well before reaching this code anyway.)

$cost = $h->{$location}{$building} wouldn't work for me. The structure contains many more things than just Locations, and a location has much more data associated with it than a set of Buildings. So I don't want to accidentally get the wrong value back if I have a location name that happens to coincide with some other field name. (Perhaps I should give a more detailed dump of a data set?)

My approach differs from Perl4's because mine can be used hierarchically, unlike $;. So I am free to do 

  $locinfo = $h->{"Locations.$location"};
  count_totals($locinfo->{"Resources"});
  compute_upkeep($locinfo->{"Buildings"});

[download]
or whatever.

In reply to Re^2: Dotted hash access by sfink
in thread Dotted hash access by sfink

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