You want a hash of arrays. Basically, you'll end up with a hash that looks like this: 
$hash = {
    'key' => ['one', 'two', 'three']
}

[download]
If you already have the hash that you show above, here's how to make a hash of arrays from your old hash: 

while ( my ($key,$string) = each %oldhash ) {
   my @elements = split /\s+/, $string;
   $newhash{$key} = \@elements;
}

# You can now access data from it like this:

# print the first element in the array referred to by $key
print $newhash{$key}->[0], "\n"; 
# print out all of the elements for a given key
print "$key: ", join @{$newhash{$key}}, '-', "\n";

[download]
Also, try out Ovid's Data::Dumper::Simple. It's a clever module which prints out data dumps in a more descriptive way. Cheers. :)

In reply to Re: Hash with one key, three values by biosysadmin
in thread Hash with one key, three values by ggg

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