You are viewing the version of this documentation from Perl 5.8.1. View the latest version
values HASH

Returns a list consisting of all the values of the named hash. (In a scalar context, returns the number of values.)

The values are returned in an apparently random order. The actual random order is subject to change in future versions of perl, but it is guaranteed to be the same order as either the keys or each function would produce on the same (unmodified) hash. Since Perl 5.8.1 the ordering is different even between different runs of Perl for security reasons (see "Algorithmic Complexity Attacks" in perlsec).

As a side effect, calling values() resets the HASH's internal iterator, see "each".

Note that the values are not copied, which means modifying them will modify the contents of the hash:

for (values %hash) 	    { s/foo/bar/g }   # modifies %hash values
for (@hash{keys %hash}) { s/foo/bar/g }   # same

See also keys, each, and sort.