[Omaha.pm] print "%hash";

[Jay Hannah <jay@jays.net>]

I hit this code today

 $body .= "Email Address: ".$$results{email}."%0D%0A" if ($$results{email});

and thought "What? Isn't Perl going to try to interpret "%0D" as a hash?

Nope.

"%hash" is not interpreted at all. It's just a string.

Fun with hashes below...

j


$ cat j.pl
my %j = ( a => 1, b => 2 );
print %j, "\n";
print %j . "\n";
print "%j\n";

$ perl j.pl
a1b2
2/8
%j


perldoc perldata
  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.  For example, you stick 10,000 things in a hash,
  but evaluating %HASH in scalar context reveals "1/16",
  which means only one out of sixteen buckets has been
  touched, and presumably contains all 10,000 of your items.
  This isn't supposed to happen.