Hey George.

At first I thought this was a no brainer and wondered why you posted it. Then I played with it a bit and realized its a bit more subtle than first glance and is a worthy post :-).

As far as I understand modifiers do not create a local scope, so regarding the first if the local() call affects the whole sub, the second if only effects the scope of the if.

sub test {
   local $\="NEWLINE" if 1;
   if (1) {
      local $\;
   }
   print "text:";
}
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So at first glance this suggests that your code should work. But I believe that the my decl happens over and over. This sounds confused (cause I am a bit confused) but consider if you had multiple lines in your __DATA__ block? Which @ary that was declared should be used? Now you see the angle I am getting at. Personally I suspect that this is a bug, insofar that perls behaviour with regard to modifiers and my() doesnt seem quite right.

Consider the following:

# This works.
my @ary;
@ary = split (" ",$_) while (<DATA>);
print join(" / ", @ary);

#As does this
my ($str,@ary);
@ary = split (" ",$str) while ($str=<DATA>);
print join(" / ", @ary);

# This doesnt work. (as you pointed out)
my @ary = split (" ",$_) while (<DATA>);
print join(" / ", @ary);

#Nor does this either
my (@ary);
@ary = split (" ",$str) while (my $str=<DATA>);
print join(" / ", @ary);
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So it looks like my doesnt work as part of a while modifier which is like the foreach modifier, but unlike foreach NO ERROR is raised. That to me makes it a bug. Incidentally the normal while() does not suffer this problem.

Anyway, if as you say you just want an array of all of the words in your __DATA__ segement then this is probably the smallest way to do it.. (uh oh did I say that? Shoot, now the obfus crew are gunna turn it into a bunch of line noise.. :-)

my @words = map { split " ",$_ } <DATA>;
print "@words\n";
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Of course you could also mess with $/ as so:

$/=" ";
my @words=<DATA>;
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But personally I wouldn't, cause you'll just end up cleaning off the newlines and spaces anyways.

Yves
--
You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)