Re: Use Hash? Array? Still confused after all these years.

Of course, TMTOWTDI, but it seems like a hash would definitely be in order. I'd use the states for keys, and the files for values. So

my %lookup = ( "Alabama" => "southern.txt", 
               "Alaska"  => "northern.txt", 
               ....
             );
my $file = $lookup{$input_state};
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Re^2: Use Hash? Array? Still confused after all these years. by TGI (Parson) on Jul 21, 2005 at 19:41 UTC
This is a bit more advanced, but it lets you assign a list of states to a region, and then generates a hash keyed by state name from. # Make a hash of regions, pointing to an array of states in each regio +n. # use qw() to quote words. # Use _ for spaces, replace with space when turning hash inside out. my %regions = ( southern => [ qw( Alabama Georgia Tennessee West_Virginia ) ], western => [ qw( Oregon Washington California Idaho Montana )], # ... ); # Turn %regions inside out. my %states; # Winds up with data like $states{Oregon} = west +ern foreach my $region (keys %regions) { foreach (@$regions{$region}) { # Copy the state list s/_/ /g; # replace _ with spaces. West_Virginia becomes We +st Virginia $states{$_} = $region # Store the state info. } } [download] TGI says moo	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Use Hash? Array? Still confused after all these years. by hmbscully (Scribe) on Jul 26, 2005 at 20:57 UTC
Thanks for all the replies. Its a lot of good stuff to digest, but luckily, this first entry helped me understand the basic concept and deal with the question at hand. Now to try and get some more work done so I have time to revisit Learning Perl.	[reply]