References to good books or urls covering this issue will be appreciated.

I am new to Perl and confused a bit by hash of hashes, array of hashes:

Given the following %HOH:

# the key field is an arbitrary int that needs to be unique - it serves no purpose other than to provide a unique key for the hash

%HOH = [
   {

      key => 1, 
      person => "Mike",
      possession => "wallet, keys, car, house",
      age => 25,
   },
   {
      key => 2, 
      person => "Mike",
      possession => "dog, cat, baseball bat",
      age => 25,
   },
   {
      key => 3, 
      person => "Dave",
      possession => "pony, house, car, keys",
      age => 21,
   },
];
[download]

How would one consolidate the hash of hashes to another hash of hashes or array of hashes so that if person and age were same, the possession would be a merge of the possession ... resulting in one entry per person/age combination but with all possessions in the array(list) of values for the possession key?

The desired result is:

%HOH = [
   {
      key => 1,   
      person => "Mike",
      possession => "wallet, keys, car, house, dog, cat, baseball bat"
+,
      age => 25,
   },
   {
      key => 3,   
      person => "Dave",
      possession => "pony, house, car, keys",
      age => 21,
   },
];
[download]

or

@AOH = (
{
      person => "Mike",
      possession => "wallet, keys, car, house, dog, cat, baseball bat"
+,
      age => 25,
   },
   {
      person => "Dave",
      possession => "pony, house, car, keys",
      age => 21,
   },
);
[download]

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