Hashes are a wonderful thing. They can be used to access structures in a clean and neat way.

Imagine you have a function that returns an @ARRAY of values, like localtime or stat. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to access the elements returned by their name? Here's how I do it:

my @datekeys = ("seconds","minutes","hour","mday","month","year","wday
+","yday","isdst");
my %localtime;
@localtime{@datekeys} = localtime( time );

printf "It now is %s:%s and the %d day of the week\n"
    ,$localtime{"hour"}
    ,$localtime{"minutes"}
    ,$localtime{"wday"}
;

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In reply to Merging two @ARRAYS into a %HASH by jamgold

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