justkar4u has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi All, Well I am trying to use a hash table for returning value when a specific key is supplied. My question is, is it possible to assign two values for a same key ?(I know that 2 keys can have same values but vice versa is not true,right?) I tried to do this using this line of code. 
my %table= ( "optimal", "good",
                  "failed",  "missing,bad");
print $table{failed};

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The output is missing,bad To be more clear on what I am trying to do, I would like to extract one value out of "missing,bad" if a particular condition is true. I am planning to parse it for the , delimiter and then store the prefix or suffix(which i believe is too clumsy). I wanted to know if there is a better way of doing this/suggestions ?. - Thanks Ram

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Re: Having multiple values for a Hash key
by wind (Priest) on Apr 30, 2011 at 01:23 UTC
    Use a hash within a hash 
    my %table = (
    optimal => 'good',
    failed => {missing => 1, bad => 1},
);

print $table{failed}{missing};

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    Or an array within the hash 
    my %table = (
    optimal => 'good',
    failed => [qw(missing bad)],
);

print (grep {$_ eq 'missing'} @{$table{failed}}) ? 'missing' : 'ok';

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[d/l]
[select]
      Hi , Thanks everyone for the reply.. I am using the solution suggested by wind since it matches closely with what i need to implement ! Thank you again for the replies.
[reply]
Re: Having multiple values for a Hash key
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 30, 2011 at 01:27 UTC
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[d/l]
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