Question

I’m having quite a difficulty, figuring out some strange behavior when looping through symbols in Perl, using the for loop.
This code snippet works just as expected:

for (my $file = 'a'; $file le 'h'; $file++) {
    print $file;
}

Output: abcdefgh

But when I try the loop through the symbols backward, like this:

for (my $file = 'h'; $file ge 'a'; $file--) { 
    print $file;
}

gives me the following as a result.

Output: h

Maybe the decrement operator doesn’t behave as I think it does when symbols are involved?

Does anybody have any ideas on the matter? I’d really appreciate your help!

Regards,

Tommy

Answer 1

The auto-decrement operator is not magical, as per perlop

You can do something like this though:

for my $file (reverse 'a' .. 'h') { 
    print $file;
}