While in principle I would agree with the statement that there is no need to re-write existing functionality from modules (= re-inventing the wheel), I would argue strongly in favour of the striving for elegance in coding. Questions like this one have an immense value as they inspire the quest for a concise and elegant solution thus fostering an in-depth understanding of Perl's inner workings. Anyway, so much for the philosophical part of my post.

Here's my code solution now. It essentially achieves the zipping in one single line of code (if you are lenient enough not to count the conversion of one input string into a list). Lemme know what you think.

use strict;
use warnings;

my $a = "ABCDEFGHIJ";
my $b = "abcde";
my @b = split "", $b;

$a =~ s/(.)/$1.($b[length($`)] or "")/ge;

print $a;
[download]

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.