Perl Coding Error: do not overwrite your hash !

Today I spent a few hours on a nasty perl coding error. Without going into too much detail, by using that piece of code in some loop processing some data …

   1: ...

   2: $entry_data->{"content"} = $content;

   3: $entry_data->{"year"} = $current_year;

   4: push(@entries,$entry_data);    

   5: .…

.. I ended up having always elements with the same content in my array “@entries” ( and it took me a while to figure that out as a root cause for my programs strange behavior ). Simply because I am storing a hash reference in that array, which is always the reference to the same hash if not modifying the code as follows:

   1: ...

   2: $entry_data->{"content"} = $content;

   3: $entry_data->{"year"} = $current_year;

   4: push(@entries,$entry_data);    

   5: $entry_data = {};

   6: ...

This tiny little extra line “$entry_data = {}” ensures that perl creates a new hash and I add new hashes to my array instead of always overwriting the same hash.

Grrrr, my stupidity .