Re: Looping through an anonymous array of arrays

On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 9:31 PM, Rodrick Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> my $arrayRef = [ 1, 2, 3, ['a', 'b', 'c', ["Hello"] ]];
>
> I have no problem returning single elements but how would one walk this list
> of elements with say a for loop?
>

You can treat an array reference like an array by prefixing it with an
@ (this is called dereferencing):

for my $item (@$arrayRef) {
    if (my $type = ref $item) {
        print "item is a $type reference\n";
    } else {
        print "item is $item\n";
    }
}

If you just want to print out the items held in the data structure you
can use a recursive function:

sub print_it {
        for my $item (@_) {
                if (ref $item) {
                        print_it(@$item);
                        next;
                }
                print "$item ";
        }
}

print_it($arrayRef);

-- 
Chas. Owens
wonkden.net
The most important skill a programmer can have is the ability to read.