perl-Data-OptList

Parse and validate simple name/value option pairs

Hashes are great for storing named data, but if you want more than one entry for a name, you have to use a list of pairs. Even then, this is really boring to write: $values = [ foo => undef, bar => undef, baz => undef, xyz => { ... }, ]; Just look at all those undefs! Don't worry, we can get rid of those: $values = [ map { $_ => undef } qw(foo bar baz), xyz => { ... }, ]; Aaaauuugh! We've saved a little typing, but now it requires thought to read, and thinking is even worse than typing... and it's got a bug! It looked right, didn't it? Well, the 'xyz => { ... }' gets consumed by the map, and we don't get the data we wanted. With Data::OptList, you can do this instead: $values = Data::OptList::mkopt([ qw(foo bar baz), xyz => { ... }, ]); This works by assuming that any defined scalar is a name and any reference following a name is its value.