Question

I have two excel files. The first excel file is like this:

12   A    P1  
23   B    P5
24   C    P2
15   D    P1
06   E    P5

The second excel file is like this:

06 100
23 20
06 200
06 95
23 05
24 18

I want to generate the following data structure

$VAR1 = {
  'P5' => {
    'E' => '06' => [100, 200, 95]
    'B' => '23' => [20, 1000, 05, 30]
      },
      'P2' => {
        'C' => '24' => [18, 23, 2300, 3456]
  },
      'P1' => {
        'A' => '12' => [24, 25, 3200, 5668]
        'D' => '15' => [168]
      }
};

The first excel file enables me to generate the following data structure.

 $VAR1 = {
   'P5' => {
     'E' => '06',
     'B' => '23'
    },
    'P2' => {
      'C' => '24'
    },
    'P1' => {
      'A' => '12',
      'D' => '15'
    }
  };

What I did for implementing the above partial structure from the first excel file is as follows:

my %Var1;
for my $i (1 .. $row1)
{
    # for simplicity, I just keep the main part to building this hash chain
    $Var1{$column3}->{$column2} = {$column1};  
}                

Here $column3 relates to p1, p2, etc; $column2 relates to E, B, etc and $column1 relates to 06,23,24,etc. The arrays associated with $column1 will be extracted from the second excel file.

My question is how to iterate through this partially finished hash %Var1, and for each key, like 06, to push 100 into it while traversing the second excel file.

Answer 1

So, assuming (what im calling the numeric key ( the ’06’ in this example ) ) is unique then perhaps a function which returns the arrayref:

sub get_arrayref_from_nkey {
    my $target = shift;
    for my $pkey ( keys %Var1 ) {
        for my $akey ( keys %{ $Var1{$pkey} } ) {
            for my $nkey ( keys %{ $Var1{$pkey}->{$akey} } ) {
                if ( $nkey eq $target ) {
                    # return the arrayref to [ 100, 200, 95, .. ]
                    return @{ $Var1{$pkey}->{$akey}->{$nkey} };
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

my $arrayref = get_arrayref_from_nkey('06');
push @{ $arrayref }, $value;    # 100

If the numeric key isn’t found the function will return undef. Also if the numeric key isn’t unique then this won’t work – because it will return the first nkey it finds.