NAME

Hash::Path - A simple way to return a path of HoH

VERSION

0.02

SYNOPSIS

use Hash::Path;

my $hash_ref = {
    key1 => {
        key2 => {
            key3 => 'value',
        },
    },
};

my $wanted = Hash::Path->( $hash_ref, qw{key1 key2 key3} );

# $wanted contains 'value'

DESCRIPTION

This module was written as proof of concept about how to find data inside a hash of hashes (HoH) with unknown structure. You can think that as hierarchical data like LDAP does, so our path could be the exactly the same as LDAP's dn, but a bit simpler because we (at least at this moment, who knows) don't want to deal with that.

This is a perfect companion for traversing YAML:

use Hash::Path;
use YAML;

my ($hash_ref) = Load(<<'EOF');
---
name: john
permissions:
  some-module:
    - read
    - write
    - execute
  another-module:
    - read
EOF
my $permissions = Hash::Path->get($hash_ref, qw(permissions some-module));

# $permissions contains [ 'read', 'write', 'execute' ]

API

get

$scalar = Hash::Path->get($hash_ref, @path);

This is the only available method. It traverses the hash reference using the supplied path array, returning the value as scalar value.

hash_path

use Hash::Path qw(hash_path);
$scalar = hash_path($hash_ref, @path);

Now you can export the hash_path function to be a bit shorter. The parameters it takes are the same as get.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Arthur Axel "fREW" Schmidt "<FREW@cpan.org>" for using this module and suggesting a better implementation for the get() method.

AUTHOR

Copyright (c) 2007, Igor Sutton Lopes "<IZUT@cpan.org>". All rights reserved.

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.