Newbie Help please.

Hi Everyone-

    I'm just starting to learn perl programing. I'm doing this through the
O'Reilly book:
Learning Perl.

I seem to be stuck on hashes. I was doing the exercise in the back of
chapter 5. This program wants a hash with 3 keys and 3 values. It then asks
for a string. That string is then matched to a value and the value is
printed. My understanding of the exercise was to define the hash with the
three pairs (keys, values). Then ask for a key and print the value This is
the program I wrote:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$map{"red"} = "apple";
$map{"green"} = "grass";
$map{"blue"} = "ocean";
print "A string please: "; chomp ($some_string = <STDIN>);
print "The value for $some_string is $map($some_string)\n";

When I run it though I get the following complaint from perl:

A string please: blue
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) at ./key3.pl line 6, <STDIN>
line 1.
The value for blue is (blue)

I thought Ok I messed up so I tried the answer in the back of the book which
was the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
%map = qw(red apple green leaves blue ocean);
print "A string please: "; chomp ($some_string = <STDIN>);
print "The value for $some_string is $map($some_string)\n";

This too gave me the same output from perl.
So here are my questions?

1.) What am I doing wrong here?
2.) Is the only difference between a hash and an array is that the array
uses predetermined numerical keys for each value?

Thanks in advance.
SA

• Newbie Help please. by SA
• RE: Newbie Help please. by Timothy Johnson
• Re: Newbie Help please. by Ahmed Moustafa
• Re: Newbie Help please. by Billie