[Perl-beginners] Read logfile to variable hash

Hi Dennis,
First a few comments on your code:

Are you sure you want to:

1. Use camelCase.

2. Not do $self->get_filename().

3. Call it "get_filename()" instead of "get_log_filename()"?
Use three-args-open, lexical filehandles, etc:

http://perl-begin.org/tutorials/bad-elements/#open-function-style
«while (my $line = <$log>)» would be more preferable here because it will
consume less memory:

http://perl-begin.org/tutorials/bad-elements/#foreach-lines
OK, here's what you can do (untested):

[code]
my $hash_ref = \%hash;

foreach my $val (@values[0 .. $#values-2])
{
$hash_ref = ($hash_ref->{$val} ||= {});
}

$hash_ref->{$values[-2]} = $values[-1];
[/code]

I did not deal with some edge cases, but hopefully it will be OK.

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

Hi Dennis

I know a weird question that you likely already thought about but still why
are you not using a combination of array and hash?

$hash->{value1} = [ value2, value3, value4, ... ]

It would save you a lot of headaches in looping over all values that are on
that one line because how are you going to easily handle a situation where
you have a hash of hashes with an undefined depth without having to jump to
a lot of difficult hoops to make it work properly?

Regards,

Rob

Thanks for the codingstyle tips, Shlomi. I instantly changed that =)

@Rob: The structure of my data is like

category_a->index_a->value_a
category_a->index_b->value_b
category_a->category_b->index_a->value_a

So sometimes I have a category in a category, sometimes it is just a
value in a category. I think in my case it is better to have a
hash-monster like that. I feel more comfortable with this style of
datastructure. But if anyone has a better idea to handle this, I'd be
glad to hear =)

Now to the code itself: I forgot to mention that its not actually a
hash, its an object. Sorry for that mistake. That might be the reason
why the code Shlomi gave to me doesn't work as intented. The $hash_ref
has some values in it, but not in the correct structure and not every
line from the file read finds its way to the hash_ref. Now thats what
I got so far:

[code]
sub read_log {
my $self = shift;
my $filename = get_filename();
print "\n$filename\n";

open my $log, "<", $filename or die "Error opening file: $!";

while (my $line = <$log>) {
chomp $line;
my @values = split /:/, $line;
my $hash_ref = $self;
foreach my $val (@values[0 .. $#values-2])
{
$hash_ref = ($self->{$val} ||= {});
}

$hash_ref->{$values[-2]} = $values[-1];
}

print Dumper $self;
}
[/code]


Greetings
Dennis
2010/12/1 Rob Coops <[email protected]>: