Re: flattening Complex Datastructures

[bronto]

in reply to flattening Complex Datastructures

Your approach is really good if, all in all, what you need is to always reach the leaves of the tree --your structure is tree-like in fact

But, say you have a three-level hash. If you need to get an hash that lies in the middle, say /a/b your code soon gets complicated, while with real HoH you could simply write something like %b = %{$a->{b}}

But if you are ready to pay the tradeoff of slowness and complicateness, you probabily want to write a "driver" object, maybe one that you could tie your hashes to: you keep working with HoH on the front-end, and get with a flat hash on the back-end. But I'm not a tie expert so I can't tell if it is possible at all :-)

Cheers!
--bronto

---

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz

[jdporter]

Your approach is really good if, all in all, what you need is to always reach the leaves of the tree

Yep. How many times have we seen this question:

I have a vector of keys, @keys = qw( foo bar none ); How can I easily get at the HoHoH element $h{foo}{bar}{none} ???

If we use the perl4 approach to multidimensional hashes, instead of true nested hashes, it's simple:

  $h{@keys}

...one that you could tie your hashes to: you keep working with HoH on the front-end, and get with a flat hash on the back-end.

Yes, that sounds very much like the Tie::Multidim module.

jdporter
The 6th Rule of Perl Club is -- There is no Rule #6.

[Ctrl-z]

Ah!, now i get your original post. This is pretty cool.


time was, I could move my arms like a bird and...