5.4.1 Keys and Values

When we evaluate a hash in a list context, Perl gives us the paired list that can be very useful. However, sometimes we may only want to look at the list of keys, or the list of values. Perl provides two optimized functions for doing this: keys and values.

use strict;
my %table = qw/schmoe joe smith john simpson bart/;
my @lastNames  = keys %table;    # @lastNames is: qw/schmoe smith simpson/
my @firstNames = values %table;  # @firstNames is: qw/joe john bart/