I presumed a level of experience that is much less common than I expected, hence the seeming cryptic nature of my message. Sorry.

This pathological representation of a hash is in wide-spread use due to some idiotic standards adopted early in the history of XML. It shows up in Perl frequently when dealing with XML. In the most recent situation I've encountered, WordPress XML-RPC returns its custom fields in such a representation. There are even some WordPress XML-RPC libraries in some languages that require you to pass in an ordinary hash rather than this pathological (array of hashes) representation of a hash -- thereby hiding the pathology.

I was hoping to discover the generic name for this pathological hash representation to search for packages that specifically deal with it so as to hide the pathology.

In reply to Re^2: the annoying keys "key" and "value" by jabowery
in thread the annoying keys "key" and "value" by jabowery

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