At some point the penny will drop for you and you will realise that you can generate data structures in Perl to match whatever you are trying to achieve. But first you need to figure out what you want to achieve.

Indeed, in Perl it is generally trivial to match a structure to the form of your data, although it is not always so easy to manage the structure you've created. Consider for example you have a file containing groups of three lines where the first line is a header, the second line is a list of objects and the third line a mapping between objects and names. You could end up with a structure that looks like:

my @records = (
    ["Record 1", [qw(obj1 obj2 obj3)], {obj1 => ['Sam'], obj3 => ['Bob
+']}],
    [
        "Record 2", [qw(obj1 obj5 obj6)],
        {obj5 => ['Lew', 'Fred'], obj6 => ['Bob']}
    ],
);

[download]

So, what are you going to call that puppy? When your structures start getting that interesting it is time to wrap it up with some code, most likely by turning the elements of @records into Record objects and provide appropriate accessor methods for the various parts of the record.

True laziness is hard work

In reply to Re^3: Best Way to Map Data by GrandFather
in thread Best Way to Map Data by walkingthecow

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