I don't like your code to populate your hash, namely:
my ($key, $value) = split /\s/, $line;
next LINE if not $key;
$hash{$key} = $value;
chomp (%hash);
Though the
chomp(%hash) kinda "works", the doco for
chomp
does not mention applying it to a hash and accordingly, I feel this code
is unclear.
Update: Whoops, the
chomp doco does indeed
mention applying chomp to a hash, as pointed out
below.
Thanks
AnomalousMonk.
I would do it something like this:
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
my %hash;
open my $fh, '<', 'hash.txt' or die "Can't open file $!";
while (my $line = <$fh>)
{
chomp $line; # remove trailing newline
$line =~ s/^\s+//; # optional: remove leading whitespa
+ce
$line =~ s/\s+$//; # optional: remove trailing whitesp
+ace
next unless length($line); # ignore blank lines
next if $line =~ /^#/; # optional: to allow comment lines
# Format: key whitespace value (value can contain whitespace)
my ($key, $value) = split ' ', $line, 2;
defined($value) or die "error: no value for '$key'";
$hash{$key} = $value;
}
close $fh;
print Dumper(\%hash);
You might further want to consider what will happen if your key
contains regex metachars (e.g. abc.xyz).
Maybe this can't happen for your data ... but if it does,
your regex may be incorrect (could use /\Q$key\E/
to escape metachars, if required by your data).
Re safely editing a file in place, see:
