Question

Up until recently, I’ve been storing multiple values into different hashes with the same keys as follows:

%boss = (     'Allan'  => 'George',     'Bob'    => 'George',     'George' => 'lisa' );  %status = (     'Allan'  => 'Contractor',     'Bob'    => 'Part-time',     'George' => 'Full-time' ); 

and then I can reference $boss('Bob') and $status('Bob') but this gets unwieldy if there’s a lot of properties each key can have and I have to worry about keeping the hashes in sync.

Is there a better way for storing multiple values in a hash? I could store the values as

        'Bob' => 'George:Part-time' 

and then disassemble the strings with split, but there must be a more elegant way.

Answer 1

This is the standard way, as per perldoc perldsc.

~> more test.pl %chums = ( 'Allan' => {'Boss' => 'George', 'Status' => 'Contractor'},            'Bob' => {'Boss' => 'Peter', 'Status' => 'Part-time'} );  print $chums{'Allan'}{'Boss'}.'\n'; print $chums{'Bob'}{'Boss'}.'\n'; print $chums{'Bob'}{'Status'}.'\n'; $chums{'Bob'}{'Wife'} = 'Pam'; print $chums{'Bob'}{'Wife'}.'\n';  ~> perl test.pl George Peter Part-time Pam