Perl Hashes - Printing All the Values or Keys in a Hash

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As we saw earlier, you cannot simply print all the values in a hash using the print command. You could, but then you would also get the keys associated with those values as well, which you may not want. Perl has a handy function, called “values,” that can help you achieve this goal:

#!/usr/bin/perl

%HowItIs = (Dumb,'You ', Fat,'YoMama ',UglyGenius,'James Payne

',Nerd,'James Payne ');

print values(%HowItIs);

This prints out just the values in the hash:

  James Payne James Payne YoMama You

If we wanted to print out all the keys, and not the values, we can do that also, using another function, “keys”. Here it is in code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

%HowItIs = (Dumb,'You ', Fat,'YoMama ',UglyGenius,'James Payne

',Nerd,'James Payne');

print sort(keys(%HowItIs));

Note that I sorted this print out also:

  DumbFatNerdUglyGenius

And of course if we wanted a list of both keys and values in a sentence, we can do that as well with the following nifty little program:

#!/usr/bin/perl

%HowItIs = (Dumb,'You ', Fat,'YoMama ',UglyGenius,'James Payne

',Nerd,'James Payne');

@All = keys(%HowItIs);

foreach $ItIs(@All)

{print "The key for $HowItIs{$ItIs} is $ItIsn"};

Which gives us the following result:

  The key for James Payne is Nerd

  The key for James Payne is UglyGenius

  The key for Yomama is Fat

  The Key for You is Dumb

Next: Alternative Methods for Creating Hashes >>
 

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