A prev and next method were supposed to be coupled with the peek methods (which would actually change the iterator), but I got trigger happy and posted before the brain dump was complete. Thanks for mopping up the grey matter.

Hmmm, I just thought of another method that might be useful: rewind, to reset the iterator. But that's probably low priority, seeing as there's no natural way to express that for unordered hashes in Perl.

gaal,
seeing as there's no natural way to express that for unordered hashes in Perl.

The iterator is reset anytime there is a new call to keys, or values. each will only do this once it reaches the end of the hash. This can cause very unexpected behavior if you mix and match - see the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my %hash = (one=>1, two=>2, three=>3, four=>4, five=>5);
my $flag; # prevent infinite loop
while ( my ($key, $val) = each %hash ) {
    if ( $val == 4 && ! $flag ) {
        my @keys = keys %hash;
        print "\t$_\n" for @keys;
        $flag = 1;
    }
    print "$key : $val\n";
}
[download]

There very well may be some good in saving off the iterator, resetting it, and restoring it so this doesn't go bonkers as it does with real hashes. I will have to give some thought to this though.

Cheers - L~R

Modified wording with regards to resetting iterator as pointed out by davido.