RE: Line contination characters - how do I access these variables

[email protected] asked

> Damian gave the solution I am studying. I have attached it at 
> the bottom. I don't understand the section between the {{ }}. For example:
> 		{ {command => $item[-1]} }

Ok. this is at first glance a bit confusing I agree.  The {} brakets are
heavilly used in Perl and have multiple meanings.

The explanation is much easier to grok when you see it in context

> singleline_command:
> 	'//'  /.*/
> 		{ {command => $item[-1]} }
            ^ ^         ^       ^  ^ ^
            | |         |       |  | |
            1 2         3       4  2 1        
 
1. The outter {} are a block definition.  

2. The inner {} are an anonymous hash creation.

3. This is a "fat comma". => This is syntactically equivelent to a normal
comma, except that Perl treats the object to its left as quoted if
necessary. 

4. This access the last element in the @item array. @item contains a list of
the parts that were matched. Negative numbers when used as indexes to an
array refer to the index of the array starting from its end.  Thus 
$item[-1]==$item[$#item]==$item[@item-1] 

So the end result is that this little piece of highly idomatic perl returns
an anonymous hash containing one key 'command' whose value is that of
whatever was matched by /.*/

HTH

Yves