Hey Matt, extra post is no problem at all.
If I am thinking correctly it just checks for line that start with a "/". Right? Yes, Right!
I see you have a link to some more info on references, I'll hit a few highlights specific to this code.

%recordState is a hash with basically 2 keys. In a complex data structure, everything is a reference until you get to the very last dimension where the data is. The value of $recordState{$record_id} is a reference to a another hash. The key to that hash is $OwnwerOrWaiting which is either set to "OWNER" or "WAITING" and the value is a reference to an array of input lines. Look at the output of Data::Dump and see the "key => value" pairs.

Also take a look at my dump loop, foreach my $recHashref ( values %recordState). There I didn't even use the $record_id key at all! I just get the values of the first dimension hash, where are references to the 2nd dimension hash. In the line
print "WAITING $_\n",  for @{$recHashref->{WAITING}}; $recHashref is dereferenced and the WAITING key is accessed. The values of that key is a reference to an array of lines. I say that that whole thing, $recHashref->{WAITING} is an array reference that I want to dereference by enclosing it in another set of curly braces and putting an @ in front. Each line gets printed out. Note that I used the exact same code pattern for OWNER as for WAITING. There is only one OWNER and that could have been:
print "OWNER   $recHashref->{OWNER}[0]\n"; which would mean give me the 0th line in the array pointed to by $recHashref->{OWNER}. There is a certain value in uniformity and so I did not handle the case of just one OWNER separately.

Maybe I confused you even more, but it this was remotely understandable, then the answer to you question above is that value of $recordState{$record_id}{$OwnerOrWaiting} is a reference to an array, which is dereferenced with the @ so that the current line can be pushed onto it.

It could very well be that the data structure can be simplified once I read more about what you are needing as an end result.

In reply to Re^3: How to reference to array keys? by Marshall
in thread How to reference to array keys? by mmartin

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