G'day jamroll,

Welcome to the Monastery.

In scalar context, @array evaluates to the number of elements. In list context, you'll get the actual elements. Instead of concatenating with '.' (which forces scalar context), you can just embed @array within interpolating quotes.

Here's an example showing all three of those scenarios:

$ perl -E 'my @x = ({}); say ">" . @x . "<"; say ">", @x, "<"; say ">@
+x<"'
>1<
>HASH(0x7fb6c68040b0)<
>HASH(0x7fb6c68040b0)<
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