Is it hot in here? <tugs at shirt collar>
I guess I was thinking of another function, although I'd feel a little less
sheepish if I knew which one. "$_ = shift @_" should work for the example.
Good point about catching strings that evaluate to FALSE. I'll keep that in
mind.
Quick question: What advantage is there to using local on the $_ variable?
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan
To: Timothy Johnson
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 2/3/02 11:13 PM
Subject: RE: why shift @_ ?
On Feb 3, Timothy Johnson said:
>sub makeArray{
> while(shift @_){
> print $_."\n";
> }
>}
>
>That way if you called the sub like this...
>
> &makeArray('hello','world','!');
>
>You should get this...
>
> hello
> world
> !
You SHOULD, but you don't.
>as your output. 'shift' removes the first element in an array and
returns
>the value. If no variable is specified, the value is stored in the $_
>variable. I have lately been converting some of my code to use this
format
>instead of foreach() loops because it is shorter and easier to read.
No, it doesn't automatically store it in $_ for you. And, since you'll
have to explicitly store it in $_ yourself, you'd better local()ize $_.
sub foobar {
local $_;
while ($_ = shift) {
# ...
}
}
But that will stop when @_ has a value that's false (0, undef, or '').
So
to fix that, you'd want to use something like:
sub foobar {
local $_;
while (@_) {
$_ = shift;
# ...
}
}
But there's really no reason NOT to use a for loop, which does most of
the
work for you, and is efficient.
sub foobar {
for (@_) {
# ...
}
}
--
Jeff "japhy" Pinyan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/
RPI Acacia brother #734 http://www.perlmonks.org/
http://www.cpan.org/
** Look for "Regular Expressions in Perl" published by Manning, in 2002
**
<stu> what does y/// stand for? <tenderpuss> why, yansliterate of
course.
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