in reply to Re: Brain muchly befuddled by nested hashes
in thread Brain muchly befuddled by nested hashes

Thank you - ptoulis (Sexton) from Nov 24, 2008 at 08:28 UTC - for your quick reply to my inquiry and your most helpful suggestions.

I recall now, I have previously read about sorting dates in century/mm/dd order instead of the traditional American date structure of dd/mm/yy.

However, if you will please note: After I parse the 'incoming' date structure into its' individual components - I do not deal with either format - in any manner - in the program. You will further note that in the line:
if (($ampm eq "a") && ($hour <= 9)) {$hour = '0'.int($hour) ; }
that I prepend a zero to the single digit hour to assist in sorting.

Could you, please, expand on your comment: "You should reconsider also, the way you build up the hash: the => seems irrelevant in the outer hash."
I have tried to mimic the example from the manpage: "perldsc", which shows: 

 %HoH = (
        flintstones => {
        lead      => "fred",
        pal       => "barney",
        },
        jetsons     => {
        lead      => "george",
        wife      => "jane",
        "his boy" => "elroy",
        },
        simpsons    => {
        lead      => "homer",
        wife      => "marge",
        kid       => "bart",
    },
 );

[download]

What am I missing (doing wrong)?
Again, thank you for your assistance, sometimes it's a chore trying to teach an old dog new tricks.
Thomas

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Re^3: Brain muchly befuddled by nested hashes
by ptoulis (Scribe) on Nov 24, 2008 at 18:55 UTC
    Even if you prepend the '0' before values, it still isn't enough. For example 2000<2008 but 10/2000>08/2008, so it is right to check big things first.

    About the hashes, my point was that the usual case is that you define a hash as %hash = (key1=>value1, key2=>value2...); and it is not frequent (if plausible) to use the => symbol inside the key definition. You say $ClubTotal{'DayOfMonth'=>$date}{..} =... which puts the '=>' in the key. Now, the hash concept is that a hash is just a table organized by distinct words. As such, there is no point in prefixing the 'DayOfMonth' (a constant string before the date) and the '=>' is really misleading because one expects a value after it. It would be much more readable to write something like this: 
    %ClubTotal = {  
                $date => {
                    TotalPerDay=>1,
                     HourSignIn=>
                            {
                            Value=>$hour,
                            ToPerlHour=>$perlHour
                            }
                    }     
                }

    [download]

    This is just an example. Things should be as simple as possible. For example, in your code you say: $ClubTotal{ 'DayOfMonth'=> $date }{'Date'} = $date ;, which means that your key and value are the same variable! There are 3 date's in this code which is a waste of time (and space). Simply stating $ClubTotal{$date}=... is enough since the date you want is the key of the hash.
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