How to fetch key of a hash through values in Hash of Arrays - perl

Question

Below is the small code snippet i have created using Hash Key and Hash Value which is an array.
And my input is Hash value (Array in this case) , i have to search for all the arrays in $ENV hash and fetch the hash key
Example if i search for m3d1 , the output should be TEST3
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
my %ENV;
$ENV{"TEST3"}=["m3d1","m3d2"] ;
$ENV{"TEST4"}=["m4d1","m4d2"] ;
$ENV{"TEST5"}=["m5d1","m5d2"] ;
$ENV{"TEST6"}=["m6d1","m6d2"] ;
print Dumper \#keys;
print Dumper \#values;
Is it possible , or is there a better design ?

Answer 1

Of course it's possible. We can visit every value in the data structure until we find the one that matches.
You didn't say what the strings represent, to I'm going to call TEST3 a group, and I'm going to call m3d1 a host. The following snippets don't assume a host is preset in only one of group.
my #groups;
for my $group (keys(%ENV)) {
for my $host (#{ $ENV{$group} }) {
if ($host eq $target_host) {
push #groups, $group;
}
}
}
die("Not found\n") if !#groups;
say for #groups;
But this isn't efficient. If you were planning on doing many lookups, this would be slow.
Let's start by turning the structure inside out.
my %groups_by_host;
for my $group (keys(%ENV)) {
for my $host (#{ $ENV{$group} }) {
push #{ $groups_by_host{$host} }, $group;
}
}
The above produces
my %groups_by_host = (
m3d1 => [ "TEST3" ],
m3d2 => [ "TEST3" ],
m4d1 => [ "TEST4" ],
m4d2 => [ "TEST4" ],
m5d1 => [ "TEST5" ],
m5d2 => [ "TEST5" ],
m6d1 => [ "TEST6" ],
m6d2 => [ "TEST6" ],
);
Then, searching becomes instantaneous.
my $groups = $groups_by_host{$target_host}
or die("Not found\n");
say for #$groups;