Thanks in advance for looking!

I have a string returned from a DB (Redis) that is pipe delimited and the individual items that are delimited are colon delimited

ex:

special:1001:area_code:617|special:1001:zip_code:02205|special:1001:dow:0|special:1001:tod:14

My goal is to convert these into a hash that looks like this (the first few sub-fields can be ignored):

{
    area_code => 617,
    zip_code => 02205,
    dow => 0,
    tod => 14
}

[download]

I could write a loop no problem:

foreach my $little_string (split(/\|/,$big_string){
    my @little_string_parts = split(/:/,$little_string);
    $result_hashref->{$little_string_parts[2]} = $little_string_parts[
+3];
}

[download]

that uses two splits though and I'm thinking a grep would be more efficient. Is there a way to iteratively progress through a string with a regex and use the matches to fill a hash? The below could work but it wouldn't account for the "big string" having a variable number of delimited members

$big_string =~ /special:[0-9]{4}:(.*):(.*)\|special:[0-9]{4}:(.*):(.*)
+\|special:[0-9]{4}:(.*):(.*)\|special:[0-9]{4}:(.*):(.*)/;
$result_hashref->{$1} = $2;
$result_hashref->{$3} = $4;
$result_hashref->{$5} = $6;
$result_hashref->{$7} = $8;

[download]

Would a Map work here? I'm inexperienced with it but my thought is that it will only apply if we do a split on the initial string

In reply to Using a regex to replace looping and splitting by mwb613

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