Question

I’m looking to make a subroutine mysub which should behave such that the following two calls are effectively the same.

mysub(["values", "in", "a", "list"]);
mysub("Passing", "scalar", "values");

What is the proper syntax to make this happen?

Answer 1

Check if @_ contains a single array reference.

sub mysub {
    if ( @_ == 1 && ref( $_[0] ) eq 'ARRAY' ) {
        # Single array ref
    } else {
        # A list
    }
}

The if clause checks that only one argument was passed and that the argument is an array reference using ref. To make sure that the cases are the same:

sub mysub {
    if ( @_ == 1 && ref( $_[0] ) eq 'ARRAY' ) {
        @_ = @{ $_[0] };
    }
    # Rest of the code
}