delete - deletes a value from a hash
delete EXPR
Deletes the specified
key(s)
and their associated
values from a hash. For each key, returns the deleted value associated with
that key, or the undefined value if there was no such key. Deleting from $ENV{}
modifies the environment. Deleting from a hash tied to a
DBM file deletes the entry from the
DBM file. (But deleting from a
tie()d hash doesn't necessarily return anything.)
The following deletes all the values of a hash:
foreach $key (keys %HASH) { delete $HASH{$key}; }
And so does this:
delete @HASH{keys %HASH}
(But both of these are slower than just assigning the empty list, or using undef().) Note that the EXPR can be arbitrarily complicated as long as the final operation is a hash element lookup or hash slice:
delete $ref->[$x][$y]{$key}; delete @{$ref->[$x][$y]}{$key1, $key2, @morekeys};
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