in reply to Looping through a hash where some keys are the same

A hash has only unique keys. You might better use a array. 
my @array = (
  [  bob => "section-a"],
  [ bob => "section-b"]
);
for ( @array ) {
  my ( $a, $b ) =  @$_;
  print "$a => $b\n";
}

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Or use Tie::DxHash this tied hash allows duplicate keys.
Boris

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Re^2: Looping through a hash where some keys are the same
by atcroft (Abbot) on Feb 18, 2005 at 01:40 UTC

    Another option would be a hash of arrays, so that each key was unique, but referred to an array of one or more values: 

    my %hash = (
  'bob' => [ "section-a", "section-b" ],
  'jan' => [ "section-d" ]
);

# And to add another....
foreach (qw(section-f section-g)) {
  push(@{$hash{'paul'}}, $_);
}

foreach my $k (keys(%hash)) {
  print "$k => ", join(",", @{$hash{$k}}), "\n";
}

    [download]

    HTH.

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[d/l]
      I'll look into those options. As for what the objective is... it's a script that scours an auction site I frequent b/c their alert system sucks so bad. My hash looks like

      "searchstring" => "section",

      There are some (very few) items that I would want to search for in different sub sections. For now, they're all in the same main section, so I just search that, but it gets like 300 hits or so each day... about half of it crap I don't want to see.

      I assume the smartest approach would to make the keys of the hash the section to search, and the value an array holding the different strings I want to search in that section, no? It'd take a fair bit of rewriting. Not sure if it's worth it at this point, but would be do-able.
[reply]
        The value could be an arrayref, as you say, or it could be a hashref. Advantage of a hash ref is you don't have to check for duplicates, since duplicates aren't allowed in a hash. Personally I use hashes a lot more than arrays.
[reply]

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