perl hashes

[artwise]

I am struggling with hashes in perl. I am trying to declare a hash, but with no keys and values(empty one). Then I want to populate keys and values from a certain file with some structure(simple text file). I have ActiveState's perl 5.8.

Example:
%glMap ();


the file looks like:
key1|val1
key2|val2
...
How can I do it?

[jeffmott]

my %hash;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my($key, $val) = split /\|/, $_, 2;
    $hash{$key} = $val;
}

__DATA__
key1|val1
key2|val2

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