[Melbourne-pm] Referencing an item in a list

Paul Fenwick pjf at perltraining.com.au
Sun Mar 26 20:49:07 PST 2006


G'day Brad/MPM,

Bradley Dean wrote:

> But it turns out (bring on printf parameter parsing wierdness I say) that
> I needed another set of parens (just keep adding them until something
> works could be a moral here... :)
> 
>  print ((gimme_an_array())[2]);

Oh!  You've been caught by the rule that says whenever Perl sees parens
following a subroutine or function call, those params are always used as the
argument list.  So:

	print ( gimme_an_array() )[2];		OR

	print (2+3)*7;

are interpreted as:

	( print(gimme_an_array()) )[2];		OR

	( print(2+3) ) * 7;

which certainly isn't what you want.

One possible way of fixing this is to use the unary plus operator, which stops
the parens appearing directly after the function name:

	print +( gimme_an_array() )[2]		OR

	print +(2+3)*7;

The other, of course, is to add more parens.  I usually prefer adding extra
parens because it means that more novice coders can understand what's going on.
 Unary plus isn't exactly a commonly seen operator.

Cheerio,

	Paul

-- 
Paul Fenwick <pjf at perltraining.com.au> | http://perltraining.com.au/
Director of Training                   | Ph:  +61 3 9354 6001
Perl Training Australia                | Fax: +61 3 9354 2681


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