Can you show me Dumper($qablock);

Update: I don't know what you want to achieve with the first code block. Do you really just want the last matching result?

McA

The program is a self-grading multiple-choice testing environment. The teacher can enter an arbitrary number of questions, with four possible answers to each question. Only one of the answers may be correct. The program randomizes the questions and answers, so a student will never get the same test twice (and can't cheat using a scoring key). This example is a simple spelling test. Three of the answers are wrong ('W') and one is right ('R'):

==========
$VAR1 = [
          [
            'a',
            'W',
            'interupt'
          ],
          [
            'b',
            'R',
            'interrupt'
          ],
          [
            'c',
            'W',
            'innterupt'
          ],
          [
            'd',
            'W',
            'intterupt'
          ]
        ];

==========
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Since the answers have been randomized, the program has to match the entered answer letter ('a..d') to the 'W' or 'R' that is the second element of one of the elements of the $qablock. Only then can the actual answer be recorded for later scoring (since the answer 'b' has no lasting significance).

The reason that I removed the square brackets from the grep is because the element of $qablock that the grep is assigning should already be an anonymous array reference. But then I still had to use the brackets for the assignment in the foreach, so I tried it with brackets as well. Basically, I've been flailing in the hope of getting lucky....

Ok, that puts some light on your problem. This may be your solution:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

use Data::Dumper;

my $choices = [
    [
        'a',
        'W',
        'interupt',
    ],
    [
        'b',
        'R',
        'interrupt',
    ],
    [
        'c',
        'W',
        'innterupt',
    ],
    [
        'd',
        'W',
        'intterupt',
    ]
];


my $answer = 'd';
# As we know that the answer matches only one choice
# and we have exactly one matching answer.
my $chosen_answer = (grep { $_->[0] eq $answer } @$choices)[0];
say Dumper($chosen_answer);
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McA

I am not sure what the objective is. However, a couple of possibilities come to mind... map{} can return a conditional thing...use () to return "nothing". See below.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $VAR1 = [
          [
            'a',
            'W',
            'interupt'
          ],
          [
            'b',
            'R',
            'interrupt'
          ],
          [
            'c',
            'W',
            'innterupt'
          ],
          [
            'd',
            'W',
            'intterupt'
          ]
        ];
        
print "Number of Questions: ", scalar @$VAR1, "\n";

#@$VAR1 produces a list of references to the arrays
#The map selects the 2nd one of each array, index [1]
#the grep in a scalar context counts them up

print "Number right: ", scalar( grep{/r/i}map{@$_[1]}@$VAR1 ), "\n";
print "Number wrong: ", scalar( grep{/w/i}map{@$_[1]}@$VAR1 ), "\n";

#Maybe the question is which one is the "right" answer, a,b,c,d?
print "\n";
print "correct answer is: ", map{@$_[1] =~ /r/i ? @$_[0]:()}@$VAR1;

__END__
Number of Questions: 4
Number right: 1
Number wrong: 3

correct answer is: b
Process completed successfully
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