Question

can anybody explain me this print statement in the following perl program.

#! /usr/bin/perl 
use strict; 

my %hash; 

&Parse('first.txt'); 
&Parse('second.txt'); 

my $outputpath = 'output.txt'; 
unlink ($outputpath); 
open (OUTPUT, ">>$outputpath") || die "Failed to open OUTPUT ($outputpath) - $!"; 
print OUTPUT "$_ \t" . join("\t", @{$hash{$_}}) . "\n" foreach (sort keys %hash); 
close (OUTPUT) || die "Failed to close OUTPUT ($outputpath) - $!"; 

sub Parse { 
    my $inputpath = shift; 
    open (INPUT, "<$inputpath") || die "Failed to open INPUT ($inputpath) - $!"; 
    while (<INPUT>) { 
        chomp; 
        my @row = split(/\t/, $_); 
        my $col1 = $row[0]; 
        shift @row; 
        push(@{$hash{$col1}}, @row); 
    } 
    close (INPUT) || die "Failed to close INPUT ($inputpath) - $!"; 
    return 1; 
}

this is the statement:

   print OUTPUT "$_ \t" . join("\t", @{$hash{$_}}) . "\n" foreach (sort keys %hash); 

Answer 1

It’s a foreach loop expressed via a postfix modifyer, which is equivalent to the following regular loop:

foreach (sort keys %hash) {
    print OUTPUT "$_ \t" . join("\t", @{$hash{$_}}) . "\n";
}

Since there’s no loop variable, the default $_ variable is used (in postfix loops, no named loop variable can be used, unlike regular ones). So, to make it more readable:

foreach my $key (sort keys %hash) {
    print OUTPUT "$key \t" . join("\t", @{$hash{$key}}) . "\n";
}

@{$hash{$key}} means take an array reference stored in $hash{$key} and make it into a real array, and join("\t", @{$hash{$key}}) takes that array and puts it in a tab-separated string.

So, for each of the keys in the hash (sorted in alphanumeric order), you would print the key name, followed by a space and a tab, followed by the contents of the arrayref (tab-separated) which is the has value for that key, followed by newline.

E.g. if the hash was ("c" => [1,2,3], "b => [11,12,13]), it would print:

b [TAB]11[TAB]12[TAB]13
a [TAB]1[TAB]2[TAB]3