I'm trying to write a subroutine that, given a hash of column=>value pairs, will generate a SQL statement to insert those pairs into a database.

So, a statement might look something like INSERT INTO table (col_1, col_1, col_3) VALUES ('foo', 'bar', 'baz')

So, I would generate that string with the hash: 

%data = ('col_1'=>'foo',
         'col_2'=>'bar',
         'col_3'=>'baz');

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And then say 
insert_hash("table", \%hash);

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Here's my subroutine; it seems to work, but I'm hoping that somebody can give me pointers on any better or more elegant ways of doing it. 

sub insert_hash {
    my $table_name = shift;
    my $rowref = shift;
    my %row = %$rowref;
  
# ?c? and ?v? are placeholders
# Any better ideas for placeholders to pretty up the regexes?
    my $sql = "insert into $table_name (?c?) values (?v?)";
    
    foreach (keys %hash) {
        $sql =~ s/\?c\?/$_,\?c\?/g;
        $sql =~ s/\?v\?/$hash{$_},\?v\?/g;
    }

# Pull off the last comma (extraneous) and the placeholders
    $sql =~ s/,\?c\?//g;
    $sql =~ s/,\?v\?//g;
    return $sql;
}

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In reply to A more elegant solution? by Cirollo

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