in reply to Bizarre Perl behavior?

Most likely, the content of @list_words is not what you think it is. Maybe it contains terminal control codes, or one single large line.

Note that you output @list_words twice, with no delimiter in between, which will make debugging this much harder.

My first attempt at debugging this would be to add some non-whitespace characters around the elements of @list_words while printing them, and cut down @list_words to say 10 elements that you can also share here:

splice @list_words, 10; # inspect only the first 10 elements

use Data::Dumper;
local $Data::Dumper::Useqq = 1; # output strings with whitespace chara
+cters escaped

while (scalar @list_words) {
  test_if_letters_are_included();

  foreach(@list_words) {
    print "list_words:<$_>\n";
    print Dumper $_; # also show the string with whitespace escaped
  }
  my @array = qw(this that the other thing);
  print "@array";
  #say "@list_words";
  say scalar @list_words;
}

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Re^2: Bizarre Perl behavior?
by Polymathic (Novice) on Jan 30, 2022 at 20:32 UTC

    Thanks for the quick reply. I'll give it a try.

    I failed to mention that when I run this on my Windows version of Perl it does not have the output problem and prints as expected.

[reply]
      > when I run this on my Windows version of Perl it does not have the output problem and prints as expected.

      sounds like you are printing control code characters which are messing with the terminal.

      Like a CR without LF might overwrite the same line over and over again.

      Cheers Rolf
      (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
      Wikisyntax for the Monastery

[reply]
        sounds like you are printing control code characters which are messing with the terminal. Like a CR without LF might overwrite the same line over and over again.

        You guessed it correctly! There was \r\n at the end of every word in the array. I was using chomp and I should have been using something like $_ =~ s/\r[\n]*//; to remove it.

        Thanks for the help!

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

        Thanks! You were right. It was \r\n and the end of every word in the array

[reply]
[d/l]

        Okay, Thanks!

[reply]

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