hash arrays for basic Perl script - perl

Question

I'm writing my first Perl script and am reading a small text file line by line. The fields are delimited by ':' so i want to split each field into a hash array using the first field(name) as the key for each. Also, (I think) I want a big hash that holds all the information, or maybe just an array that holds each field so I can print all info on one line based on a pattern. I've not gotten far as %info is creating odd # elements in the hash assignment. Should I make it a regular array, and am I even going about this the right way? Basically, lines are in this order.
name:phone:address:date:salary
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
print $#ARGV;
if($#ARGV == -1)
{
print "Script needs 1 argument please.\n";
exit 1;
}
my $inFILE = $ARGV[0];
#open the file passed
open(IN, "$inFILE") || die "Cannot open: $!"; #open databook.txt
my %info = (my %name, my %phone, my %address, my %date, my %salary);
while(<IN>)
{
%info = (split /:/)[1];
}
close($inFILE);

Answer 1

First of all, you should define your data structure depending on how you would use the information parsed. If you're using the name as index to search the information, I suggest to use a nested hash, indexed by the name:
{name => {phone => ..., address => ..., date => ..., salary => ...}, ...}
If you're not going to use name as index, just store the information in an array:
[ {name => ..., address => ..., date => ..., salary => ...},
{name => ..., address => ..., date => ..., salary => ...}, ...]
In most cases I would use the first one.
Secondly, arrays and hashes in Perl are flat. So this:
my %info = (my %name, my %phone, my %address, my %date, my %salary);
doesn't make sense. Use a ref to store the data.
Last but not least, Perl has a syntax sugar for the input file. Use <> to read file from arguments, instead of opening files explicitly. This makes the program more "Perlish".
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
my $info = {};
while (<>) {
chomp;
my #items = split /:/, $_;
$info->{$items[0]} = { phone => $items[1],
address => $items[2],
date => $items[3],
salary => $items[4] };
}
print Dumper $info;