One of the challenging aspects of the Wise Old Elf's tasks is dealing with all of the various lists of presents requested by all of the children. These arrive in a variety of formats with different structures and these need to be all displayed on a webpage so each can be checked and validated.

This causes a problem displaying unstructured data on a web page.

Luckily there is a module which helps here - the Hash::Flatten module takes an arbitrary data structure and converts it into a simple hash with the key to each element being a Template Toolkit style token refering to the element in the data structure.

For example, given a deep data structure such as this:

my $data = {
  'England' => { 
    'Bucks' => {
      'Milton Keynes' => {
        'Some Road' => { 
          4 => {
            'Bloggs' => {
              'Fred' => 'Fire Engine'
            },
          },
        },
      },
    },
  },
  'USA' => {
    'Maine' => {
      'York' => {
        'Main Road' => { 
          'White House' => { 
            'Naughty Child' => 'Ipad',
          },
        },
      },
    },
  },
};

This would be awkward to display on a web page but using the flatten function of Hash::Flatten you can convert it into a simple flat hash which can then be displayed as a simple table. i.e.

use Hash::Flatten qw/ flatten /;
my $flathash = flatten( $data );

The variable $flathash will then contain:

$flathash = {
  'England.Bucks.Milton Keynes.Some Road.4.Bloggs.Fred' => 'Fire Engine',
  'USA.Maine.York.Main Road.White House.Naughty Child'  => 'Ipad',
};

You can now easily present this in a table:

use HTML::Entities qw(encode_entities);
print "<table>";
while (my @kv = each $flathash->%*) {
    print "<tr>";
    print "<td>", encode_entities($_), "</td>"
        for @kv;
    print "</tr>";
}
print "</table>";

Or store it in a flat DBM File or process it in any number of ways! You can even go the other way too by using the unflatten function to turn the flattened data structure back into a nested data structure:

use Hash::Flatten qw( unflatten );

my $data = {
  'food.reindeer'    => 'carrots',
  'food.santa.pie'   => 'mince',
  'food.santa.drink' => 'sherry',
};

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper unflatten($data);

Which prints out:

$VAR1 = {
  'food' => {
    'reindeer' => 'carrots',
    'santa' => {
      'pie' => 'mince',
      'drink' => 'sherry'
    }
  }
};

The elves actually use Hash::Flatten for a lot of things in various contexts. Through passing a second argument (or using the OO-interface) it's possible to control what deliminator are used to join / split the parts of hash and arrays.

my $data = {
   'Beano' => {
     'Denis'  => [ 'Catapult','Dog Treats'],
     'Minnie' => [ 'Tricks', 'Hair Bows' ],
     'Roger'  => [ 'Gadgets' ],
   },
   'Archie' => {
     'Josie'   => [ 'Guitar', 'Cat Ears' ],
     'Sabrina' => [ 'Spellbook' ],
   },
 };

 my $flathash = flatten( $data, {
   HashDelimiter => ' -> ', 
   ArrayDelimiter => ', ',
 });

And now the flattened hash looks like this:

$flathash = {
  'Beano -> Denis' => 'Catapult, Dog Treats',
  'Beano -> Minnie' => 'Tricks, Hair Bows',
  'Beano -> Rodger' => 'Gadgets',
  'Archie -> Josie' => 'Guitar, Cat Ears',
  'Archie -> Sabrina' => 'Spellbook',
}

Happy data munging!