Well, it is possible to achieve what you want with a one-liner like so: 

my %hash = do { chomp(my @lines = <FILE>); @lines };

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Also note that there's a very important difference between your proposed code and the actual code. The proposed code reads in the entire file at once into a list in memory (which is also what my code does), whereas the second snippet reads two lines at a time. So it's not just a matter of code aesthetics - it's a matter of what you want your program to do.

The reason your proposed snippet doesn't work is that you can't alter the keys in a hash - it really goes against the concept of what a hash is. You can alter the value for a given key, and you can add and delete keys, but it doesn't really make sense to alter a key.

In reply to Re: Building a chomped hash from a file by Errto
in thread Building a chomped hash from a file by LucaPette

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