Question

I am not sure what to call the following data structure: Hash or Array.

I am trying to add a 3rd element to it. Can someone please guide me. Some explanation would be much appreciated as I am new to perl and to this forum as well.

Existing structure:

my $var= [
          bless( {
                   'name' => 'Name1',
                   'groupid' => '2',
                   'description' => 'Desc2'
                 }, 'my_type' ),
          bless( {
                   'name' => 'Name2',
                   'groupid' => '4',
                   'description' => 'Desc3'
                 }, 'my_type' ),
];

I want to add the following into it:

bless( {
       'name' => 'Name3',
       'groupid' => '9',
       'description' => 'Desc4'
     }, 'my_type' ),

Thank you for your time and help!

Answer 1

your $var is an “arrayref”.

With array, we can push elements at the end:

my @a = (1, 2, 3);
push @a, 4;
print "@a"; # "1 2 3 4"

To use an arrayref as an array, we have to dereference it:

my $a = \@a;
push @{ $a }, 5;
print "@{$a}"; # "1 2 3 4 5"

In these simple cases the dereferencing can be shortened, so we could have written

push @$a, 5; # sic! two sigils

In your case this would be

push @$var, bless(...);