in reply to Re^5: How to combine these 2 subroutines in one?
in thread How to combine these 2 subroutines in one?

The syntax @{ $_[0] } says: read the first argument passed into the sub clean_list, and then, treating it as a reference, dereference it to get an array. If this argument isn’t an array reference (as it probably won’t be if you passed in a list when calling the sub), then of course you’ll get an error message to that effect!

Just test the first element, that is, call ref( $_[0] ) — and don’t try to dereference it until you’re sure it’s a reference, which is the whole point of testing it by calling ref.

(I think maybe you should study perlreftut, then perllol, perldsc, and perlref, until you’re comfortable with references in Perl.)

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

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Re^7: How to combine these 2 subroutines in one?
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 04, 2014 at 09:14 UTC
    I see!
    So please tell me if I am correct, if the list has been passed as an array, then $type_of_arg will be empty, whereas if it's passed as a reference to an array it's ARRAY, right?
[reply]
[d/l]

      Correct!

      That is, provided that the passed-in-array does not itself contain references. For the purpose of this exercise, you may know that it won’t, but in the general case, it might, which is why a solution using wantarray may be preferable here, as explained above.

      Note that “empty” here means the empty string, i.e. "", so to make the test more robust you could write:

      my $type_of_arg = ref $_[0];

if ($type_of_arg eq "ARRAY")
{
    # Handle an array reference
}
elsif ($type_of_arg eq "")
{
    # Handle an array
}
else
{
    die "Unexpected reference type '$type_of_arg': $!";
}

      [download]

      Hope that helps,

      Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
        Thank you so much for these tips, references have always been a headache to me... Actually, I don't quite understand what do we use them for, I need to study up on this more!
[reply]

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