Question

is there a direct way to find out the index of an array element,
like for example
@a=qw(a b c);

how do you get the index of the element b;
i know its 1, but imagine this situation for a large array.

Answer 1

Assuming that the ‘answer’ is still 1 when searching for ‘b’ in:

@a = qw(a b b c);

then, use module List::MoreUtils and firstidx (aka first_index):

use List::MoreUtils qw{ firstidx };

print firstidx { $_ == 'b' } @a;

The only downside to this is that List::MoreUtils is not (AFAICS) a core module – so it has to be installed from CPAN. At least, the Perl documentation doesn’t document it.