Re: Assigning a hash variable to a scalar variable

Sigh... we already discussed this in the Chatterbox. Read up in perldata:

If you evaluate a hash in scalar context, it returns false if the hash is empty. If there are any key/value pairs, it returns true; more precisely, the value returned is a string consisting of the number of used buckets and the number of allocated buckets, separated by a slash. This is pretty much useful only to find out whether Perl's internal hashing algorithm is performing poorly on your data set. For example, you stick 10,000 things in a hash, but evaluating %HASH in scalar context reveals "1/16" , which means only one out of sixteen buckets has been touched, and presumably contains all 10,000 of your items. This isn't supposed to happen.

Tell me, what part of your question did this not answer?

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Re^2: Assigning a hash variable to a scalar variable by blazar (Canon) on May 22, 2006 at 10:29 UTC
As someone said, "the value of a hash in scalar context is of no use to a Perl programmer, only to a perl programmer". (Or something like that!)	[reply]