Hello oh wise monks,

I am trying to construct a Hash of an Array and frankly I am making a Hash of it. This is what I am trying to achieve

1. I am creating the hash with the keys only and no values. This is done by reading in a file and splitting out values based on the same position. This also includes removing tabs and white space, creating an array to be used later and using a temp hash to weed out any duplicates. The file I am reading in looks like this (there are multiple lines to the file):

   # Comments - To be ignored
   field 1    ;field 2    ;field 3    ;field 4    ;field 5;    field 6;
   [download]

   Fields 5 onwards are not needed for this process. Field 4 is what I want to use for the key, but is not unique. Field 1 is then going to be used to populate the array in the hash and is unique for each line. The first part of the code, to create the empty hash is done like this:

   while (<FILE>) {  
       chomp;
       if ($_ !~ m/#/) {        
           s/\t//g;
           s/\s//g;
           ($f1,$f2,$f3,$f4,$f5) = split (/;/, $_,5);
           push @file,$_;        
   
           unless ($seen{$f4}) {
               $seen{$f4}=1;
               $mailhouse{$f4} = "";
           }    
       }
   }
   [download]

   This seems to work
2. What I am doing next, is to then search against @file the array that I have made, using the hash keys to match against field 4. If field 4 is a match, I then want to push field 1 into the array for the hash with that key:

   for $mh ( keys %mailhouse ) {
       foreach (@file) {
           ($g1,$g2,$g3,$g4,$g5) = split (/;/, $_,5);
           if ($mh eq $g4) {
               push @{ $mailhouse{$mh} }, $g1;
           }
       }    
   }
   [download]

   This is the part that does not work.

What seems to happen is once the field 1 is pushed into the array, it seems to populate for all the keys of the hash.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Can anyone suggest an alternative?

Cheers, the hoff

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