Perl FAQ's - 4

What does length(%HASH) produce if you have thirty-seven random keys in a newly created hash?

5
length() is a built-in prototyped as sub length($), and a scalar prototype silently changes aggregates into radically different forms. The scalar sense of a hash is false (0) if it's empty, otherwise it's a string representing the fullness of the buckets, like "18/32" or "39/64". The length of that string is likely to be 5. Likewise, `length(@a)' would be 2 if there were 37 elements in @a.

If EXPR is an arbitrary expression, what is the difference between $Foo::{EXPR} and *{"Foo::".EXPR}?

The second is disallowed under `use strict "refs"'.
Dereferencing a string with *{"STR"} is disallowed under the refs stricture, although *{STR} would not be. This is similar in spirit to the way ${"STR"} is always the symbol table variable, while ${STR} may be the lexical variable. If it's not a bareword, you're playing with the symbol table in a particular dynamic fashion.

How do I do < fill-in-the-blank > for each element in an array?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
@homeRunHitters = ('McGwire', 'Sosa', 'Maris', 'Ruth');
foreach (@homeRunHitters) {
print "$_ hit a lot of home runs in one year\n";

}

How do I replace every <TAB> character in a file with a comma?

perl -pi.bak -e 's/\t/,/g' myfile.txt

What is the easiest way to download the contents of a URL with Perl?

Once you have the libwww-perl library, LWP.pm installed, the code is this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;

$url = get 'http://www.websitename.com/';

How to concatenate strings with Perl?

Method #1 - using Perl's dot operator:
$name = 'checkbook';
$filename = "/tmp/" . $name . ".tmp";

Method #2 - using Perl's join function
$name = "checkbook";
$filename = join "", "/tmp/", $name, ".tmp";

Method #3 - usual way of concatenating strings

$filename = "/tmp/${name}.tmp";

How do I read command-line arguments with Perl?

With Perl, command-line arguments are stored in the array named @ARGV.
$ARGV[0] contains the first argument, $ARGV[1] contains the second argument, etc.
$#ARGV is the subscript of the last element of the @ARGV array, so the number of arguments on the command line is $#ARGV + 1.
Here's a simple program:
#!/usr/bin/perl
$numArgs = $#ARGV + 1;
print "thanks, you gave me $numArgs command-line arguments.\n";
foreach $argnum (0 .. $#ARGV) {
print "$ARGV[$argnum]\n";
}

When would `local $_' in a function ruin your day?

When your caller was in the middle for a while(m//g) loop
The /g state on a global variable is not protected by running local on it. That'll teach you to stop using locals. Too bad $_ can't be the target of a my() -- yet.

What happens to objects lost in "unreachable" memory..... ?

What happens to objects lost in "unreachable" memory, such as the object returned by Ob->new() in `{ my $ap; $ap = [ Ob->new(), \$ap ]; }' ?

Their destructors are called when that interpreter thread shuts down.
When the interpreter exits, it first does an exhaustive search looking for anything that it allocated. This allows Perl to be used in embedded and multithreaded applications safely, and furthermore guarantees correctness of object code.

Assume that $ref refers to a scalar, an array, a hash or to some nested data structure. Explain the following statements:

$$ref; # returns a scalar
$$ref[0]; # returns the first element of that array
$ref- > [0]; # returns the first element of that array
@$ref; # returns the contents of that array, or number of elements, in scalar context
$&$ref; # returns the last index in that array
$ref- > [0][5]; # returns the sixth element in the first row

@{$ref- > {key}} # returns the contents of the array that

How do you match one letter in the current locale?

/[^\W_\d]/
We don't have full POSIX regexps, so you can't get at the isalpha() <ctype.h> macro save indirectly. You ask for one byte which is neither a non-alphanumunder, nor an under, nor a numeric. That leaves just the alphas, which is what you want.

Perl uses single or double quotes to surround a zero or more characters. Are the single(' ') or double quotes (" ") identical?

They are not identical. There are several differences between using single quotes and double quotes for strings.
1. The double-quoted string will perform variable interpolation on its contents. That is, any variable references inside the quotes will be replaced by the actual values.
2. The single-quoted string will print just like it is. It doesn't care the dollar signs.
3. The double-quoted string can contain the escape characters like newline, tab, carraige return, etc.
4. The single-quoted string can contain the escape sequences, like single quote, backward slash, etc.

How many ways can we express string in Perl?

Many. For example 'this is a string' can be expressed in:
"this is a string"
qq/this is a string like double-quoted string/
qq^this is a string like double-quoted string^
q/this is a string/
q&this is a string&
q(this is a string)

How do you give functions private variables that retain their values between calls?

Create a scope surrounding that sub that contains lexicals.
Only lexical variables are truly private, and they will persist even when their block exits if something still cares about them. Thus:
{ my $i = 0; sub next_i { $i++ } sub last_i { --$i } }
creates two functions that share a private variable. The $i variable will not be deallocated when its block goes away because next_i and last_i need to be able to access it.