After nearly five years of working with Perl, I must admit, I still cannot grasp when or how to use a hash. My chapter 5 of the llama is just one big block of highlighting and pencil question marks.

Here's the situation that has made me think its time to figure this out:

I have a registration form collecting, among other things, standard address information from the user. The form data is then dealt with via a script. In the end, the script needs to write the data to one of 7 different csv files based on which state was submitted. I have a list of the states that will comprise each file.

In my head it makes perfect sense that I should look at the state and then if state = blah, then write that line to file = eh. But I can't understand or see what structure I should use to do this. Should I put each list of states into an array? Somehow I think there should be a hash used.

Many TIA. ~WD

In reply to Use Hash? Array? Still confused after all these years. by hmbscully

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.