Re^3: the annoying keys "key" and "value"

[ikegami]

An array of hashes whose elements are 'key' and 'value'.

It preserves the order of the pairs, and allows for duplicate keys. This structure would be useful for storing an HTML form, for example.

If you don't care about losing the order of the pairs, and you don't care about clobbering duplicate keys, you can flatten the structure using one of the following:

my %flattened;
for (@data) {
   $flattened{ $_->{'key'} } = $_->{'value'};
}

my %flattened = map @{$_}{qw( key value )}, @data;