Re: How to delete hash element

[Ahmed Moustafa Ibrahim Ahmed]

Michael,

Thanks a lot.

Ahmed
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Michael Fowler 
  To: Ahmed Moustafa Ibrahim Ahmed 
  Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
  Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2001 2:14 PM
  Subject: Re: How to delete hash element


  On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 12:41:03PM -0800, Ahmed Moustafa Ibrahim Ahmed wrote:
  > If I know the key and offset of the element, how can I delete that hash
  > element, please?

  As far as I understand the followup clarification, what you really want to
  do is delete an element in an array, which just happens to be in a hash.

  So, you have a data structure something like:

      %hash = (
          key1    =>  ['key1, element1', 'key1, element 2'],
          key2    =>  ['key2, element1', 'key2, element2', 'key2, element3'],
      );

  And you want to delete the first element in the $hash{'key2'} array.  That'd
  be accomplished like so:

      unshift @{ $hash{'key2'} };

  Or, say you want to delete the second element in the $hash{'key1'} array:

      splice(@{ $hash{'key1'} }, 1, 1)


  See perldoc perldata for more information on dealing with arrays, perldoc
  perldsc for information on dealing with complex data structures, and perldoc
  -f unshift and perldoc -f splice for information on the unshift and splice,
  respectively.


  I'm really surprised at some of the people suggesting you use delete for
  this.  Most of them should know better.  Using delete on an array element
  will remove that element, but only if it's on the end.  If it's in the
  middle, or at the beginning of the array, it'll simply cause the exists
  operator to return false for that element.  I doubt that's what you wanted.


  Michael
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