Including Hashes within Hashes in Perl

manpreet Best Answer 3 years ago

G'Day,

I'm currently working on creating big hashes from a lot of smaller hashes. Let's say that these smaller hashes are defined in a file each, and then can be included by the bigger hash.

For eg, let's look at some small hashes

File personcontact.pl:

   return {
            \'firstname\' => {
                \'__type\' => \'String\'
            },
        \'lastname\' =>  {
            \'__type\' => \'String\'
            },
        %{include("/tmp/address.pl")}
    }

File address.pl:

return {
        \'address\' => {
        \'street\' => {
            \'__type\' => \'String\'
            },
        \'unit\' => {
            \'__type\' => \'String\',
            \'__validation_function\' => {
                \'is_a_number\' => \'\'
            },
            \'__schema_constraints\' => {
                \'is_not_null\' => \'\'
            }
        },
        \'suburb\' => {
            \'__type\' => \'String\'
        },
        \'__type\' => \'ARRAY\'
        }
    } 

And I've got a considerable number of these...

The way I'm trying to re-create the hash is using the include subroutine, which looks like this:

 sub include {
my ($filename) = @_;
my $file; 
open(my $fh, "<", $filename) or die ("FILEOPEN: $!");
while(my $line = <$fh>) { $file .= $line; }
my $result = eval $file;
die("EVAL: $@") if $@;
close($fh) or die("FILECLOSE: $!");
return $result;
 }

I know I must be doing something wrong, but I'm not sure what. I keep on getting errors like Useless use of a variable in void context at (eval 11) line 4, line 6 or Odd number of elements in anonymous hash at (eval 11) line 5, line 6. I'm not sure how to go about finding (eval 11) line 4-3, line 6 though. Any suggestions on use of Perl debuggers or any pointers on where I might be going wrong will be much appreciated.

Thanks!