Array Element Deletion

[rpike]

Hi, I have an a hash and each element has an array ($hash{"SomeName"}[0], $hash{"SomeName"}2, etc..,). How can I delete a specific element from the array? How can I have it so that the last element extracted makes $#hash{"SomeName"} -1? I'm aiming to have a hash that has keys that are dates and in each have an array of values which I want to randomly select from and, once selected, delete it from the array. I'd appreciate any help you can give on this. Thanks in advance. Rob

[ikegami]

If you'd normally use	then use
@a = grep { ... } @a	@{$h{$k}} = grep { ... } @{$h{$k}}
splice(@a, ...)	splice(@{$h{$k}}, ...)
etc

[kennethk]

You could try splice.

[GrandFather]

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dump::Streamer;

my %hash = (
    somename => [1 .. 3],
    othername => [reverse -3 .. -1]
);

Dump (\%hash);
splice @{$hash{somename}}, 1, 1;
Dump (\%hash);

Prints:

$HASH1 = {
           othername => [
                          -1,
                          -2,
                          -3
                        ],
           somename  => [
                          1,
                          2,
                          3
                        ]
         };
$HASH1 = {
           othername => [
                          -1,
                          -2,
                          -3
                        ],
           somename  => [
                          1,
                          3
                        ]
         };

[zentara]

You should make a running example, with proper code syntax.....your hash description is invalid code and confusing.

[rpike]

I'll put it this way then. I have a hash whereby it has a key for each date in a range. Each date could have multiple people assigned. So I might have a hash entry like this :

$hash{"DEC012008"}[0] = "Mike";
$hash{"DEC012008"}[1] = "Steve";
etc..,

I want to randomly select one of the elements in the array assigned to the hash entry DEC012008 and then remove it from that array so, if I come back to that date, I don't reselect a person that was already selected.

[Krambambuli]

It always pays to take a look onto when searching for a solution. It looks to me that Tie::Pick is exacly what you want.

As for the list reference you might need, it's no crime to dereference it explicitely in order to use simpler structures , like say


my $candidates_ref = $hash{"DEC012008"};

Hth

[matrixmadhan]

For the last element from an array reference you could try

$arr->[-1]

instead of finding the scalar of de-referred array reference and subtracting 1 from that.

This is something that I learned here yesterday