Loading a textfile into a hash

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

So I have a text file where each line contains an entry, a colon, and a definition, e.g.

natural number: a non-negative integer
counting number: a positive integer
rational number: a real that can be expressed as a fraction
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etc. I want to load these into a hash, with with entries as keys. I currently do it like this:

%words = ();

while (<>) {
    chop;
    ($word, $def) = split /: */;
    $words{$word} = $def;
}
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This works. But isn't there a simpler, shorter, cooler way to do this? Maybe a one-liner?

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Re: Loading a textfile into a hash by kabel (Chaplain) on Nov 14, 2002 at 10:23 UTC
`use strict; use warnings; use Data::Dumper; my %hash = map {chomp; split /: /} <DATA>; print Dumper \%hash; __DATA__ natural number: a non-negative integer counting number: a positive integer rational number: a real that can be expressed as a fraction` [download] UPDATE: included chomp*	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Loading a textfile into a hash by Monky Python (Scribe) on Nov 14, 2002 at 10:38 UTC
a regex solution. `my %words =(); map { chomp; if (/([^:]+):[\s]+(.*)/) { $words{$1} = $2;} }<>;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]