Re: creating a hash from a text file.

[johngg]

You can avoid global regex matches if you split into key/value pairs then further split on spaces slicing out the first two elements.

$ perl -MData::Dumper -e '
> my $str = q{1 human 2 flower 3 fruits 5 human 6 car 9 flower asdgjha
+shdnh gsdh sjs klja};
> my %hash =
>    map { ( split m{\s+} )[ 0, 1 ] }
>    split m{(?x) (?<=\w) \s+ (?=\d)}, $str;
> print Data::Dumper->Dumpxs( [ \ %hash ], [ qw{ hash } ] );'
$hash = {
          '6' => 'car',
          '1' => 'human',
          '3' => 'fruits',
          '9' => 'flower',
          '2' => 'flower',
          '5' => 'human'
        };
$

I hope this is of interest.

[AnomalousMonk]

Why would one want to bother avoiding global regex matches? (In fact, doesn't split at some level involve a global regex match?)

[johngg]

Poor wording on my part! What I meant was "as an alternative to" but it came out wrong :-(