Question

This is my problem, I’m not very knowledgeable in Perl, and I have this function that needs to be fixed.

When this function deviceModelMenu() is called, the CLI displays the following text:

The following models are available
==================================================
1.   
2. Cisco1240 
3. Catalyst3750 
4. Catalyst3650 
5. HP2524 

The first item is empty, which is wrong, and I need to fix that, the piece of code that displays this menu is:

my $features = shift;
print "=" x 50, "\n";
print "The following models are available\n";
print "=" x 50, "\n";
my $i=1;
foreach (keys %{$features->{features}[0]->{deviceModel}})
{
    print "$i. $_ \n";
    $i++;
}

If I add the following line:

warn Dumper($features->{features}[0]->{deviceModel});

It dumps this:

$VAR1 = {
      'deviceModel' => {
                         '' => {
                                 'cfg' => []
                               },
                         'Cisco1240' => {
                                        'cfg' => [
                                                 'cisco1240feature.cfg'
                                               ]
                                      },
                         'Catalyst3750' => {
                                           'cfg' => [
                                                    'catalyst3750feature.cfg'
                                                  ]
                                         },
                         'Catalyst3650' => {
                                           'cfg' => [
                                                    'catalyst3650feature.cfg'
                                                  ]
                                         },
                         'HP2524' => {
                                     'cfg' => [
                                              'hp2524feature.cfg'
                                            ]
                                   }
                       }
    };

As you may notice, the first item is indeed empty. I added the following line to skip it, and just print the rest of the info:

if ($_ eq '') {
        shift;
}

But it doesn’t seem to work do what I want. I want to skip the item if it’s empty.

Answer 1

Well, shifting @ARGV (implicit argument to shift in main program) nor shifting @_ (implicit argument of shift in a function) are not going to help you, because you are not printing either of them.

You can either:

1. Not add the '' entry in the first place (depends on how it’s generated)

2. Remove the '' entry before printing:

   delete $features->{features}[0]->{deviceModel}->{''};
   

3. Don’t print the entry:

   if($_ eq '') {
       next;
   }
   

   or

   if($_ ne '') {
       print "$i. $_ \n";
       $i++;
   }