Anonymity provides you with the ability to create very complex data structures. Say you're stuck with a flat ASCII file that really ought to be a database. You parse the lines, and create a named hash to represent your database. The values can now be array or hash references, so that the rest of the data in your record can be organized how you want it -- but how do you get as many arrays and hashes as you need, on the fly?

Anonymous hashes and arrays, of course.

Even better is a situation I just came across where I needed to build an array for each key, but I didn't know when I got to a key if I'd seen it before. So I just use 

# Rebuild the canonical list, but now we lose duplicates
foreach my $name (keys %byname) {
    # First instance of the id number needs an array ref
    if (! $final{$byname{$name}}) {
    $final{$byname{$name}} = [ $name ];
    }
    # Additional instances get pushed onto the existing
    # (anonymous) array
    else {
    push @{$final{$byname{$name}}}, $name;
    }
}

[download]
This is a cool example because the %byname hash was built from a hash that had array refs as values, and the arrays were filled with names, possibly duplicates. When I built the %byname hash, the duplicates get eaten up since they "point" to the same key, so that the %final hash looks a bit like the hash %byname was built from, but all the duplicate names are gone.

I will be the first to admit that I need to master the 

 ->
notation to make my code more readable and intuitive, though :)

In reply to RE: RE: Anonymity by snax
in thread Anonymity by snax

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