In the spirit of TWTOWTDOI, a variant of fmerges's solution to use hash slices: 
my %g = ();
my @innerKeys = qw/ specie gener age haircolor /;
while(<INFO>) {
 my @vals = split /,/, $_;
 my $name = shift @vals;
 @{$g{$name}}{ @innerKeys } = @vals;
}

[download]

On a related note, I happened to just now be working with similar code that additionally leverages Text::CSV so that you could have a line like "Mr. Jones, Jr.",human,male,47,gray 
  my $csv = Text::CSV->new();
  open FILE, $filename or die "couldn't open file '$filename': $!";

  # if the file has colnames in the first row, do this:
  $_ = <FILE>;
  $csv->parse($_);
  my @cols = $csv->fields();

  # otherwise, manually define them:
  my @cols = qw/ name specie gener age haircolor /;

  while(<FILE>){
    # let Text::CSV do the hard work.
    $csv->parse($_);

    # this turns blanks into undef's -- remove the "map {}" part if bl
+anks are ok.
    my @vals = map { !defined($_) || $_ eq '' ? undef : $_ } $csv->fie
+lds();

    # This hashes the whole row
    my $row = { map { $cols[$_] => $vals[$_] } 0 .. $#cols };

    # Now do whatever you need with it.
    $g{ $row->{name} } = $row;
    # Or a common/generic usage might be:
    push @rows, $row;
  }

[download]

In reply to Re: Syntax for Hashes of Hashes by davidrw
in thread Syntax for Hashes of Hashes by o2bwise

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