Question

I have a hash (in Perl) where the values are all numbers. I need to create another hash that contains all key/value pairs from the first hash where the value is the maximum of all values.

For example, given

my %hash = (
    key1 => 2,
    key2 => 6,
    key3 => 6,
);

I would like to create a new hash containing:

%hash_max = (
    key2 => 6,
    key3 => 6,
);

I’m sure there are many ways to do this, but am looking for an elegant solution (and an opportunity to learn!).

Answer 1

use List::Util 'max';
my $max = max(values %hash);
my %hash_max = map { $hash{$_}==$max ? ($_, $max) : () } keys %hash;

Or a one-pass approach (similar to but slightly different from another answer):

my $max;
my %hash_max;
keys %hash; # reset iterator
while (my ($key, $value) = each %hash) {
    if ( !defined $max || $value > $max ) {
        %hash_max = ();
        $max = $value;
    }
    $hash_max{$key} = $value if $max == $value;
}