Perl Question

All,
I am in the middle of writing a Perl script and have come across something a little perplexing. I am doing a "grep" to search for a term in an array:

if (grep /$someterm/, @somearray)
{
print "Found the term in the array\n";
} else {
print "No term found in array\n";
}

Is there a way to return the element in the array if the term was found? For example, say the term is found, can I get the location of the corresponding element in the array.

For instance if the term was found at @somearray[32], can I get that into a variable somehow?

Any help on this would be excellent.

Thanks..

Lucas Cochrane
lcochrane@dc.com

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Comments

james1

Please Read The Fine Manual.

http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.005_03/pod/func/grep.html

The 3rd sentence should be of interest to you.

Alternatively, as the docs mention, you may be more interested in map() than grep().

-- James

--
James H Koh
Interwoven Engineering

Ottawa_IWOV

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. Might you be able to give me an example based on the code snippet I provided in my original post? Things are still a little confusing...

Thanks

Lucas Cochrane
lcochrane@dc.com

laj1

if (grep /$someterm/, @somearray)
{
print "Found the term in the array\n";
} else {
print "No term found in array\n";
}

So, as the perldocs say, you can get the number of matches by retruning grep() into a scalar context, and you can get the list of matches by returning into a list context.

@matches = grep /$someterm/, @somearray; # will fill @matches with elements from @somearray

But if you really want the indexes, then you're probably best off doing this:

@indexes = ();
for ($i = 0; $i <= $#somearray; $i++) {
push (@indexes, $i) if $somearray[$i] =~ m/$someterm/;
}

You do it this way because grep() and map() iterate over the list elements, but don't work with the element indexes.

Len.

Len Jaffe
My Heart Is A Flower
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