http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1043357

gri6507 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

When processing CSV files, I usually use Text::CSV to read in the first line to get the column headings and then I use that information to index into the rest of the data by column names (I know what the columns are called, but I don't know what column number they are). Currently, I use the following code, which does not feel very Perl-ish.
use warnings; use strict; use Text::CSV; # setup a CSV parser my $csvParser = Text::CSV->new({ binary => 1, sep_char => ',', empty_i +s_undef => 1 }) or die "Cannot create new CSV parser: $!\n"; open my $csvHandle, "<", $csvFile or die "could not open $csvFile: $!" +; # figure out the column headings from the first line my @csvColumns = (); foreach my $colName (@{$csvParser->getline($csvHandle)}) { push @csvColumns, $colName; } # reverse that to allow lookup by name my %csvColumns; for my $colNum (0 .. scalar(@csvColumns)-1) { $csvColumns{$csvColumns[$colNum]} = $colNum; } # access some column in the CSV file by name while (my $line = $csvParser->getline($csvHandle)) { print "Column Foo has value $$line[$csvColumns{Foo}]; }
Is there a more perl-like way to reverse an array into a hash that could then be used to get the index into the data?