Question

I have a config file that looks a bit like this:

add
    1
    2
concatenate
    foo
    bar
    blat

What I’m trying to do is turn this into hashes like %hash = (name=>"add", args=> [1,2]) etc, and push the hash references into a single array. Looping through the file and creating each hash seems straightforward enough, except I get stuck when it comes to naming these hashes to push their references into the array. The config file is going to change all the time and have a variable number of different name/arg combinations to store. Is there a way to iterate through hash names so I can push them into an array one at a time?

So far it looks like this:

my %temphash = (name=>'add', args=>[1,2]);  

push (@array, \%temphash);

Can I make that %temphash into something generated on the fly and push it before moving on to the next one?

Edit: Context

The plan is to use those ‘name’ keys to call subroutines. So something like this could work:

my %subhash = (add=>\&addNumbers, concatenate=>\&concat);

Except the list of subroutines I’m going to need to call are in the config file and I won’t know what they are until I start reading from it. Even if I include the names of the subroutines right there in the config file, how do I iterate through them and add them as elements to that hash?

Answer 1

Well, you can simply use curly brackets to make an anonymous hash:

push @array, { name => 'add', args => [1,2] };

You can create the same effect by utilising the lexical scope of the my declaration. E.g.:

my @array;
while ( ... ) {
    ...
    my %hash = ( ... );
    push @array, \%hash;
}