Question

I need the first two names only in a string.

my $myNames = "Jacob, Michael, Joshua, Matthew, Ethan, Andrew";

my $meNewNames = join ( ',',splice( split(/,/,$myNames), 0, 2));

Please rectify me if anything wrong in it or we can achive it in another way.

print "$meNewNames\n";

It throws the error.
Type of arg 1 to splice must be array (not split)

Thanks.

Answer 1

Well, like the error says, the first argument must be an array. The possible solutions:

my $meNewNames = join ( ',',splice( [ split(/,/,$myNames) ], 0, 2)); 

Make an anonymous array reference out of your split return values. However, this only works in perl version 5.14 and up. You can do it more simply like this:

my $meNewNames = join ( ',', (split(/,/,$myNames))[0,1] ); 

Use a subscript to take the first two values of your split. In this style, it is perhaps more readable to do:

my @names = split /,\s*/, $myNames;
my $meNewNames = join ',', @names[0,1];