There is a nasty trap waiting for you in:

my $e;
foreach $e (...)

[download]

The lexical $e you declare outside the loop is not the same entity as the $e you use as a loop variable. In particular, the lexical $e is not set to the value of the loop variable $e following the last iteration of the loop. It is much better to write:

foreach my $e (...)

[download]

to avoid misunderstandings. Note that the loop variable is an alias for each item that is iterated over. That means that if you alter the contents of the loop variable you are altering the contents of the item the loop variable is aliased to. Consider:

my @data = 1 .. 10;

for my $item (@data) {
    $item *= 5;
}

print "@data\n";

[download]

prints: 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50

Perl reduces RSI - it saves typing

In reply to Re: XML::Simple - storing/retrieving 2 tables into 1 XML file by GrandFather
in thread XML::Simple - storing/retrieving 2 tables into 1 XML file by iphony

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.