I have just started with Perl scripting, while making an array and and fetching it from the hash variable. I am getting an awkward output.
Code is here:
%name= ( "xyz",1 ,"is",2, "my",3,"name",4);
%copy=%name;
$size=%name;
print " your rank is : $copy{'xyz'}";
print " \n";
print " the size of the array is : $size";
output is coming as :
your rank is : 1
the size of the array is : 3/8
why is the size of the array is of 3/8?
It is internal information about the hash, please check the perl documentation:
If you evaluate a hash in scalar context, it returns false if the hash is empty. If there are any key/value pairs, it returns true; more precisely, the value returned is a string consisting of the number of used buckets and the number of allocated buckets, separated by a slash. This is pretty much useful only to find out whether Perl's internal hashing algorithm is performing poorly on your data set.
So here specifically it means that you have 8 buckets allocated in the hash and three of them are used.
To get the size use:
$size = keys %hash; # scalar is implicit here
print(scalar keys %hash);
If you want to find out the number of keys/values by using scalar keys:
my %name= ( "xyz",1 ,"is",2, "my",3,"name",4);
my %copy = %name;
my $size = scalar keys %name;
print "your rank is : $copy{'xyz'}\n";
print "the size of the array is : $size\n";
