How to iterate through Hash (of Hashes) in Perl?

Question

I have Hash where values of keys are other Hashes.

Example: {'key' => {'key2' => {'key3' => 'value'}}}

How can I iterate through this structure?

Answer 1

This answer builds on the idea behind Dave Hinton's -- namely, to write a general purpose subroutine to walk a hash structure. Such a hash walker takes a code reference and simply calls that code for each leaf node in the hash.

With such an approach, the same hash walker can be used to do many things, depending on which callback we give it. For even more flexibility, you would need to pass two callbacks -- one to invoke when the value is a hash reference and the other to invoke when it is an ordinary scalar value. Strategies like this are explored in greater depth in Marc Jason Dominus' excellent book, Higher Order Perl.

use strict;
use warnings;

sub hash_walk {
    my ($hash, $key_list, $callback) = @_;
    while (my ($k, $v) = each %$hash) {
        # Keep track of the hierarchy of keys, in case
        # our callback needs it.
        push @$key_list, $k;

        if (ref($v) eq 'HASH') {
            # Recurse.
            hash_walk($v, $key_list, $callback);
        }
        else {
            # Otherwise, invoke our callback, passing it
            # the current key and value, along with the
            # full parentage of that key.
            $callback->($k, $v, $key_list);
        }

        pop @$key_list;
    }
}

my %data = (
    a => {
        ab => 1,
        ac => 2,
        ad => {
            ada => 3,
            adb => 4,
            adc => {
                adca => 5,
                adcb => 6,
            },
        },
    },
    b => 7,
    c => {
        ca => 8,
        cb => {
            cba => 9,
            cbb => 10,
        },
    },
);

sub print_keys_and_value {
    my ($k, $v, $key_list) = @_;
    printf "k = %-8s  v = %-4s  key_list = [%s]\n", $k, $v, "@$key_list";
}

hash_walk(\%data, [], \&print_keys_and_value);