I have a script that queries a database and prints the results on an HTML page. Nothing special there. To start, I build my data structure by getting rows of data and putting them into a hash. I also have an array with all of the column headings in the query.

Originally, I merged the arrays into a hash with the following code: 

   while ( my @row = $dbQuery->fetchrow_array() ) {
      @info{@{$headings}} = @row;
   }

[download]

Then I realized that the null values in the table were raising undefined warnings. I fixed this by looking at each element in the row and replacing undefined values with empty strings. Here's the code: 

   while ( my @row = $dbQuery->fetchrow_array() ) {
      foreach (@{$headings}) {
         # replace nulls with empty strings
         if ( defined $row[0] ) {
            $info{$_} = shift @row;
         } else {
            $info{$_} = "";
         } # if
      } # foreach
   } # while

[download]

I like the elegance of the former method, but it doesn't give me the data I want. The working code seems kludgy. Is there a way to get the results from the latter with the elegance of the former? How would you do this? Thank you.

In reply to Merging Arrays into a Hash with Substitutions by svsingh

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