Re^2: Complex hash?

if (ref($hash{$_}) eq 'ARRAY')

I dont understand this.. Does the word 'ARRAY' have a special meaning in this context? What more such special words are there, and where is it possible to read about this? Appearently it does not work to write 'array' in lc.

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Re^3: Complex hash? by imp (Priest) on Aug 24, 2006 at 22:36 UTC
The reason that 'array' doesn't match is that you are comparing the return value of ref with the string 'array'. ref returns what sort of reference something is, and in the case of arrays that string is 'ARRAY' See ref for more information.	[reply]
Re^3: Complex hash? by perlfan (Parson) on Aug 24, 2006 at 23:38 UTC
ref returns the following values: SCALAR ARRAY HASH CODE REF GLOB LVALUE And it those that you must test for - depending on what you are looking for.	[reply]
Re^4: Complex hash? by GrandFather (Saint) on Aug 25, 2006 at 04:13 UTC
Just to disambiguate a little: `ref` returns SCALAR for a reference to a scalar. For a simple scalar it returns undef. Note too that `ref` returns the object type for an object so the range of strings that can be returned is essentially unlimited. DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel	[reply] [d/l] [select]