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in reply to Re: perl puzzle - cartoon couple registry (beginner, semi-golf)
in thread perl puzzle - cartoon couple registry (beginner, semi-golf)

Building off mrbbking, why don't we try and get rid of \n. After thinking and messing around bit, I ended up using $*: The multiline matching variable. I'd love to know *why* this works, and if it's compatible with *nix, as I used activestate.

Update: Tested on a FreeBSD shell, and it *does* work, as long as we run it with perl -l...

Please don't run this with warnings, as it won't work because $* is a deprecated special variable.

Here Goes: Still 59 Letters
#! perl -l %couples = ( Fred=>"Wilma", Barney=>"Betty", George=>"Jane", Homer=>"Marge", Peter=>"Lois" ); print"$_ is married to $couples{$_}$*"for sort keys%couples
Another idea that may or may not have merit is to set %couples to a shorter word, and call that in the print. Something that would (logically) be *like*
print"$_ is married to $c{$_}$*"for sort keys(%c=%couples)
That code doesn't work, though, and would save you just one character.

Update 2: I found it strange that I was getting newlines, instead of 0 or 1 from $*, so I investigated. From perldoc perlrun: -l enables automatic line-ending processing. If octnum is omitted, sets $\ to the current value of $/. That means that there's no reason to use $*, as -l will give us $/, anyways.

You will then realize that the previous answers would be correct, if we got rid of \n, or in my case $* (-l chops the last letter off in addition, which meant that my $* which should have been evaluated as 0 or 1, was being chopped off and replaced by a newline ($/). Strage, but we don't even need to print newlines, with perl -l :)

That means: print"$_ is married to $couples{$_}"for sort keys%couples can replace the respective line in the previous solution(s)

Gyan Kapur
gyan.kapur@rhhllp.com

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Re: Re: (Revelation) Re: A Bit Of Help
by belg4mit (Prior) on Jun 13, 2002 at 03:53 UTC
    Damn keys
    print"$_ is married to $a{$_}$*"for sort keys%{*a=*couples}
    is the same whereas
    print"$_ is married to $a{$_}$*"for sort keys*a=*couples
    is no go and
    print"$_ is married to $a{$_}$*"for sort keys%a=%couples
    is just not right...

    --
    perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"