Recipe 5.1. Adding an Element to a Hash
Author: Tom Christiansen & Nathan Torkington
Date: 1999-07-02T01:32:28Z

#

| Chapter 5 Hashes |

## 5.1. Adding an Element to a Hash

### Problem

You need to add an entry to a hash.

### Solution

Simply assign to the hash key:

    $HASH{$KEY} = $VALUE;

### Discussion

Putting something into a hash is straightforward. In languages that don't provide the hash as an intrinsic data type, you have to worry about overflows, resizing, and collisions in your hash table. In Perl, all that is taken care of for you with a simple assignment. If that entry was already occupied (had a previous value), memory for that value is automatically freed, just as when assigning to a simple scalar.

    # %food_color defined per the introduction
    $food_color{Raspberry} = "pink";
    print "Known foods:\n";
    foreach $food (keys %food_color) {
        print "$food\n";
    }

    Known foods:
    Banana
    Apple
    Raspberry
    Carrot
    Lemon

If you store `undef` as a hash key, it gets stringified to `""` (and generates a warning if your program is running under -w). Using `undef` as a key is probably not what you want. On the other hand, `undef` is a valid value in a hash. But if you fetch the value for a key that isn't in the hash, you'll also get `undef`. This means you can't use the simple Boolean test `if` `($hash{$key})` to see whether there is an entry in `%hash` for `$key`. Use `exists($hash{$key})` to test whether a key is in the hash, `defined($hash{$key})` to test if the corresponding value is not `undef`, and `if` `($hash{$key})` to test if the corresponding value is a true value.

In Perl's hashing algorithm, permutations of a string hash to the same spot internally. If your hash contains as keys many permutations of the same string, like `"sparc"` and `"craps"`, hash performance can degrade noticeably. In practice, this seldom occurs.

### See Also

The "List Value Constructors" section of perldata (1); the "List Values and Arrays" section of Chapter 2 of Programming Perl; Recipe 5.2

5.0. Introduction |  | 5.2. Testing for the Presence of a Key in a Hash