Question

How do I make an array shorter in Perl? I read some webpages indicating that I can assign:

$#ARRAY = 42; 

I read that the use of $# is deprecated. I need a solution that will work for an array of arrays, too. This didn’t work:

$#$ARRAY[$i] = 42; 

Answer 1

I’m not aware of assigning $#ARRAY being deprecated; perldoc perldata from 5.10.0 certainly says nothing about it. It is the fastest way to truncate an array.

If you want something a little more readable, use splice:

splice @ARRAY, 43; 

(Note 43 instead of 42 – $#ARRAY gets you the last index of the array, whereas splice taks the length of the array instead).

As for working on arrays of arrays, I assume you mean being able to truncate a nested array via a reference? In that case, you want:

$#{$ARRAY->[7]} = 42; 

or

splice @{$ARRAY->[7]}, 43;