How do I add a new Key,Value pair to a Hash in an array of hash in perl? - perl

Question

Hi I have a need to add a new key,value pair to the hash entries within an array of hashes.
Below is some sample code which does not work(simplified with only 1 array entry) The output of the print statement just contains the 1 entry.
my #AoH;
push #AoH, { TEST1 => 'testvalue' };
for my $hash (#AoH)
{
$hash{'TEST2'} = 'testvalue2';
print Dumper($hash);
}
What am I doing wrong?
Thank you.

Answer 1

This code looks a little strange so I am going to assume it was done like that for the purposes of showing it briefly here, but the main thing you need to do to fix your code is change:
$hash{'TEST2'} = 'testvalue2';
to:
$$hash{'TEST2'} = 'testvalue2';
or:
$hash->{'TEST2'} = 'testvalue2';
The extra '$' or '->' dereferences the hash reference '$hash'. Since neither is there, it treats $hash{'TEST2'} as a different variable: '%hash' (not '$hash') and assigns 'testvalue2' to that. You would have gotten a good error message:
Global symbol "%hash" requires explicit package name at - line XX
if you tried to run this code with:
use strict;
use warnings;
at the beginning... which you should always do, so do that every time from now on.

Answer 2

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
my #AoH=();
my %data_source_hash=(
TEST1 => 'testvalue1',
TEST2 => 'testvalue2'
);
# adds whole hash as the array element
push #AoH,{ %data_source_hash };
print Dumper(#AoH);
#AoH=();
print "---------------------------\n";
# adds each hash $key, $value pair as an element
while ( my ($key, $value) = each %data_source_hash )
{
push #AoH, { $key => $value };
}
print Dumper(#AoH);
#AoH=();
print "---------------------------\n";
# adds extra hash entry to each array element
push #AoH, { TEST1 => 'testvalue' };
push #AoH, { TEST3 => 'testvalue3' };
foreach my $el (#AoH)
{
my $key = 'TEST2';
$$el{$key} = $data_source_hash{$key};
}
print Dumper(#AoH);