Question

I have an array. The elements in the array are containing semi colon in between them.

Array looks something like this:

@Array = { "AUT;E;1",
           "AUT;E;2",
           "CHE;A;1",
           "CHE;C;4"
         };

I want to split the array elements using ‘;’ (semicolon) as delimiter.

By using hash of hashes I want to store ‘AUT’ as key and under that want to store E => 1 and E => 2.

i.e I needed the hash as

%HashOfElem = (
         'AUT' => {
                     'E' => 1,
                     'E' => 2
                  },

         'CHE' => {
                     'A' => 1,
                     'C' => 4
                  }
              )

For that purpose I wrote the following code which is not behaving as expected 🙁

foreach(@Array)
{
    my @TmpArray = split(/;/,$_);

    %HashOfElem = (
              $TmpArray[0] => {
                                  $TmpArray[1] => $TmpArray[2]
                              }
                  );

}

If my approach is wrong then which data structure in perl can be used to achieve above purpose?

Please help..

Answer 1

Note that you’re doing wrong assignement to @Array, it should be (parenthesis instead of braces):

updated according to comment:

my @array = (
    "AUT;E;1",
    "AUT;E;2",
    "CHE;A;1",
    "CHE;C;4"
);

so your script becomes:

my @array = (
    "AUT;E;1",
    "AUT;E;2",
    "AUT;E;2",
    "CHE;A;1",
    "CHE;C;4"
);
my %hash;
my %dups;
foreach (@array) {
    next if exists $dups{$_};  # skip this line if already stored
    $dups{$_} = 1;
    my @tmp = split/;/;
    push @{$hash{$tmp[0]}{$tmp[1]}}, $tmp[2];
}
say Dumper\%hash;

output:

$VAR1 = {
          'CHE' => {
                     'A' => [
                              '1'
                            ],
                     'C' => [
                              '4'
                            ]
                   },
          'AUT' => {
                     'E' => [
                              '1',
                              '2'
                            ]
                   }
        };