Question

In other languages I’ve used like Erlang and Python, if I am splitting a string and don’t care about one of the fields, I can use an underscore placeholder. I tried this in Perl:

   (_,$id) = split('=',$fields[1]);

But I get the following error:

Can’t modify constant item in list assignment at ./generate_datasets.pl line 17, near “);”
Execution of ./generate_datasets.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

Does Perl have a similar such pattern that I could use instead of creating a useless temporary variables?

Answer 1

undef serves the same purpose in Perl.

(undef, $something, $otherthing) = split(' ', $str);