foreach $i ($data[0], $data[1]){

What do you expect this to do? There's no @data in your program; what does it contain?

'$short' => '$place',

The key of this pair is the literal string $short and not the contents of the variable $short. Likewise the value of this pair is the literal string $place and not the contents of the variable $place. When you use a scalar variable in a double-quoted string, Perl interpolates the value of that variable in the string (that is, Perl looks up the value and inserts it into the string). There's no interpolation in single-quoted strings.

%stuff = ( ... )

This will overwrite the hash at each iteration of the loop. Similarly, closing your (unused) filehandle within the body of the loop will close it multiple times.

I suspect you want a program more like:

use strict;
use warnings;

open my $fh, 'data.txt' or die "Can't read data.txt: $!\n";

my %stuff;

while (<$fh>)
{
    chomp;
    my ($short, $place) = split /\|/, $_;

    $stuff{$short} = $place;
}

close $fh;

[download]

... but that's a rough guess. (Because you're a novice, let me point out gently that naming a filehandle OUT when you open it for reading will confuse people.)

In reply to Re: novice with hash/data file question by chromatic
in thread noob with hash/data file question by bhall

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