in reply to Re: Re: Re: Link a hash and an array
in thread Link a hash and an array

Thank you very much for the recodeing. I have found it very edifying. It does work, and work quite well, and I am adding it to my mental perl toolset. But it does not do exactly what I need to do.

What I need to do is store the data in an array and access it from a hash. I need to be able to make a change using the a hash variable and have it affect the array variable.

You have shown me how to copy the data from an array into a hash using key names from another array. A valuable function, but not what I need.

Thank you,

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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Link a hash and an array
by revdiablo (Prior) on Mar 13, 2004 at 00:01 UTC
    But it does not do exactly what I need to do.

    Yeah, that's what I pointed out in my Update. But as I said there, I think it might be a bad idea to keep the actual data in two places. Even using references, there's the chance that the references get stale and you're pointing to different data. I would strongly suggest picking either the hash, or the array, and keep the data there. Then, in the other one, store nothing but indexes (unique keys) that show where to get the data.

    Perhaps an example will make it more obvious. Here I will store the actual data in arrays, but have a lookup table to map hash keys to array indexes:

    my %index = (firstname => 0, lastname => 1, address => 2, town => 3, zip => 4); my @array1 = ("Bob", "Smith", "1234 Main St", "Anytown", "20500"); my @array2 = ("Joe", "Blow", "4321 Street Ln", "Notown", "20050"); print "First name (from array1): $array1[ $index{firstname} ]\n"; print "Address (from array2): $array2[ $index{address} ]\n";

    Notice that we can fairly easily access the data via key name, but we don't have to worry about making sure two disperate structures stay in sync. The only thing we have to worry about is the keys-to-indexes map getting out of date -- but hopefully that is a rare problem.

    Another approach that you might find interesting is to just use an array, and have constants to store the array indexes. This would give the advantage of not quite as verbose a syntax. Here's an example of that:

    use constant { FIRSTNAME => 0, LASTNAME => 1, ADDRESS => 2, TOWN => 3, ZIP => 4 }; my @array1 = ("Bob", "Smith", "1234 Main St", "Anytown", "20500"); my @array2 = ("Joe", "Blow", "4321 Street Ln", "Notown", "20050"); print "First name (from array1): $array1[ FIRSTNAME ]\n"; print "Address (from array2): $array2[ ADDRESS ]\n";