SAMS Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours THIRD EDITION

Lists and Hashes

When I discussed how to initialize a hash, I hinted that hashes and arrays are somehow related. Whenever a hash is used in a list context, Perl unwinds the hash back into a flat list of keys and values. This list can be assigned to arrays, like any other list:

%Movies = ( 'The Shining' => 'Kubrick', 'Ten Commandments' => 'DeMille', Goonies =>
 'Spielberg');
@Data = %Movies;

At this point, @Data is an array containing six elements. (The even elements—zero included—are directors' names, and the odd elements are movie titles.) You can perform any normal array operation on @Data, and then you can reassign the array to %Movies, as ...