Question

Say a Perl subroutine returns an array:

sub arrayoutput
{
    ...some code...
    return @somearray;
}

I want to access only a specific array element from this, say the first. So I could do:

@temparray=arrayoutput(argument);

and then refer to $temparray[0].

But this sort of short reference doesn’t work: $arrayoutput(some argument)[0].

I am used to Python and new to Perl, so I’m still looking for some short, intuitive, python-like way (a=arrayoutput(some argument)[0]) to get this value. My Perl programs are getting very long and using temporary arrays like that seems ugly. Is there a way in Perl to do this?

Answer 1

Slices

use warnings;
use strict;

sub foo {
    return 'a' .. 'z'
}

my $y = (foo())[3];
print "$y\n";

__END__

d

Alternately, you do not need an intermediate variable:

use warnings;
use strict;

sub foo {
    return 'a' .. 'z'
}

print( (foo())[7], "\n" );

if ( (foo())[7] eq 'h') {
    print "I got an h\n";
}

__END__

h
I got an h