Hey Monks! I have a question on mapping data, and the best way to do it. I always find a way to do it, but I am almost positive that my way is not the best way. It may work, but I want it to look good too ;).

So, let's assume we have a file, that we for some odd reason cannot sort, and that file contains something like this:

sales:bob@foo.com
sales:joe@foo.com
retail:steve@bar.com
sales:debbie@foo.com
sales:john@foo.com
support:david@blah.com
retail:judy@bar.com
support:jose@blah.com

[download]
Now, suppose we need to take that and get output like this: 
sales:bob@foo.com,joe@foo.com,debbie@foo.com,john@foo.com
retail:steve@bar.com,judy@bar.com
support:david@blah.com,jose@blah.com

[download]
I have always found a way to do it, using hash of hashes, like in the code below: 
%hash;
while (<>) {
    my ($dept,$email)=split(/:/);
    $hash{$dept}{'email'} = $email;
}

[download]
That is a horrible way to do it, and I know this. This has been one thing that has been very difficult for me in Perl, is wrapping my mind around the best way to map data like this.

Any help/input is really appreciated. Thank you Monks!

By the way, sorry I only provide a short snippet of code, but at the moment I cannot come up with a good way to handle the problem given in the example :(

In reply to Best Way to Map Data by walkingthecow

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