Re^7: Iterating Through Cell Blocks with Spreadsheet::Read

[Hammer2001]

Anomalous, thanks for your response. Adding a line "print Dumper $sheet;" generates error:

print() on unopened filehandle Dumper at ./minitest.pl line 33.

References like:

my $sheet_count = $book->[0]{sheets};

before the loop work, but even though I have:

$sheet = $book->[$sheet_index] or next;

this does not seem to be doing the trick. I have tried many variations with no success. I had know autovivification as Perl magic. Knowing the proper term allows me to read about the full effects of the feature. Thanks for that. Adding:

use warnings;
use strict;

up top makes no difference in the result. Thanks, Hammer.

[AnomalousMonk]

You need to
    use Data::Dumper;
in order for the  Dumper function to be accessible in your code; then
    print Dumper $sheet;
will actually print something. See Data::Dumper. (I tend to like Data::Dump a bit better.)

... even though I have:
$sheet = $book->[$sheet_index] or next;
this does not seem to be doing the trick.

But my point remains the same: in order for a statement like
    $name = $sheet{"${_}28"};
to work, a hash named  %sheet must exist somewhere in your code (somewhere in scope, that is). I.e., there must be a statement something like
    my %sheet = ( ... );
somewhere. Do you say that such a statement exists?

Update: The other point to make is that if the  %sheet hash actually does exist, the expressions  $sheet{"F28"} and  $sheet->{"F28"} access two completely different hashes!

[Hammer2001]

Anomolous, Data::Dumper works nicely (when used correctly). It shows the expected values in the format:

'F29' => '1',

though I can make no sense of the order in which it displays contents. I have:

my %sheet;

declaration though it's not initialized. Initialization with:

my %sheet = ();

doe not make a difference in the result.

Thanks,

Hammer.

[AnomalousMonk]

Further to Anonymonk's point:

>perl -wMstrict -le
"use Data::Dump;
 ;;
 my $sheet = { qw(F29 foo  G30 bar) };
 dd $sheet;
 ;;
 my %sheet;
 ;;
 print qq{'$sheet->{F29}'};
 print qq{'$sheet{G30}'};
"
{ F29 => "foo", G30 => "bar" }

'foo'
Use of uninitialized value $sheet{"G30"} in concatenation (.) or strin
+g at -e line 1.
''

Do you see how the expressions  $sheet->{F29} and  $sheet{G30} access two completely different structures, one of which is empty?

... I can make no sense of the order in which it displays contents.

A hash has no internal "order" except for the pairing of each unique key with its value. Access to and listing of hash keys, values and key/value pairs is (apparently) random. (Update: Don't be mislead by the fact that the order in the dump displayed above matches the order of initialization of the hash reference example: this is entirely adventitious. The dump of a larger hash structure will show greater disorder — but again, a key always cleaves to its value.)

[Anonymous Monk]

And why would an empty has contain something? It wouldn't right, its empty :)