hash

THIS MODULE IS EXPERIMENTAL. The interface to this module is pretty much guaranteed to change in later versions of News::Gateway. Don't rely on the current interface.

This module provides a generic interface for loading hashes from disk files. It can transparently handle either regular files (which are loaded into a memory hash) or Berkeley db files (which are tied to a hash directly). The following method is included:

hash_open (FILE [, SPLIT])

If FILE ends in .db, then it will be tied directly to a hash. Otherwise, it will be opened and its contents read into memory. SPLIT is an anonymous code reference that will be called with each line and is expected to return a list consisting of the key and then the value (or values, if there are more than one associated with a key). If SPLIT isn't provided, each line minus the trailing newline will be taken as a key and the value will always be 1.

If SPLIT returns more than one value for a key, the key will be associated with an anonymous array containing all the values. Otherwise, the key will be associated with the value directly.

This method returns a reference to the resulting hash, or undef if the file could not be opened.