Well, I'm just taking a guess as to what you want from the data you have supplied, but a hash of hashes might work

my %people = ( 7 => { name    => 'Bob Jones',
                      address => '555 Anywhere Street',
                      city    => 'Allentown',
                      state   => 'Pennsylvania' },
               3 => { name    => 'Pete Hollister',
                      address => '222 Northview Drive',
                      city    => 'Shoreham',
                      state   => 'unknown' }
              );

my $idnumber = 3;
print $people{ $idnumber }{ name };
[download]

The above code prints "Pete Hollister". Here's the same thing with a hash of arrays:

my %people = ( 7 => [ 'Bob Jones', '555 Anywhere Street', 'Allentown',
+ 'Pennsylvania' ],
               3 => [ 'Pete Hollister', '222 Northview Drive', 'Shoreh
+am', 'unknown' ]
              );

my $idnumber = 3;
print $people{ $idnumber }[0];
[download]

Or, to be complete obnoxious (and I don't recommend this), we could go with an array of pseudo-hashes which would allow you to use this as a hash of hashes or a hash of arrays as you like:

my $phashref = { name => 1, address => 2, city => 3, state => 4 };
my %people = ( 7 =>[$phashref, 'Bob Jones', '555 Anywhere Street', 'Al
+lentown', 'Pennsylvania' ],
               3 =>[$phashref, 'Pete Hollister', '222 Northview Drive'
+, 'Shoreham', 'unknown' ] );

my $idnumber = 3;
print $people{ $idnumber }->{ name } . "\n";
print $people{ $idnumber }->[1];
[download]

The above resulted from my being a bit bored at work and having some free time. I was just playing around and I strongly advise against this approach. Aside from the difficulties with maintenance, merlyn mentioned that pseudo-hashes are probably not going to be in Perl 6.

Cheers,
Ovid

Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.