Glorius and patient Monks...

I haven't work with Perl for a while so this is one of the questions that will have simple answer and I get to do a head slap after I read the asnwer.

I'm attempting to populate a combo box using a hash, which in turn is populated by a text file. If the text file has one value per key separated by a tab, then the following code works great to create the hash. Populating the combo box goes swimmingly from there.

my ($hash, $file) = @_;
  my $dir = "C:\\Program Files\\ArcMan\\";
  if(-e $dir.$file){
    open(TABLE, $dir.$file);
    while(<TABLE>){
      my($key, $value) = split(/\t/,$_);
    $$hash{$key} = $value;
    }
    close (TABLE);
    }else{
         ErrorDialog("$file does not exist. ", $!);
    }
    
#delete last eol return in text file so it does not appear #in hash

delete $$hash{"\n"};

[download]

However, when there are multiple values per key the process breaks down. No surprise since the code is set up to split the first tab it finds.

ex: Name 'bob' 'sue' 'dave'. where Name is the key with three values separated by tabs. When values are separated by spaces then I get 'bob sue dave' as a single value.

So I'm stumped. Thanks in advance.

In reply to creating hashes by philc

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