Dynamically/recursively building hashes in Perl?

Question

I\'m quite new to Perl and I\'m trying to build a hash recursively and getting nowhere. I tried searching for tutorials to dynamically build hashes, but all I could find wer

Answer 1

I ran your code and found a few problems:

• you haven't scoped @elements properly.
• with that recursion you're creating a hash that references itself, which is not what you want.
• in your outermost call, the second arg to constructHash() is a string, but on the recursive call inside, you pass an array of @elements

Try this.

use Data::Dumper;

my $finalhash = {}; 
my @input = split "\n", < constructHash($remainder) } ; 
    } else {
        return { $first , "" }; 
    }
}

foreach $lines (@input) {
    my $linehash = constructHash($lines);
    my $firstkey = (keys %$linehash)[0];
#    print Dumper $linehash;
    $finalhash->{$firstkey} = $linehash->{$firstkey};
} 


print Dumper $finalhash;

It produces

$VAR1 = {
          'five' => {
                      'six' => {
                                 'seven' => {
                                              'eight' => ''
                                            }
                               }
                    },
          'one' => {
                     'two' => {
                                'three' => ''
                              }
                   },
          'four' => ''
        };

Remember, Perl hashes aren't ordered.