in reply to Question about loops and breaking out of them properly

Your next is not inside the grep's block (which is "{ $_ eq $component }"), so it doesn't apply to it, only to the for - and in any case I wouldn't try to affect a grep or map with those control keywords. I would suggest of thinking of map and grep as always applying to the whole list, and it's also best practice for their blocks not to have any side effects.

If you wanted to apply them to only part of the list, I would suggest filtering the list with grep first, or e.g. a slice. For anything more complex, use a for loop.

Another common use case, which might apply in your case, is wanting to know from grep whether there is any match in the list, and stopping the search after that first match, for efficiency. This can be done with e.g. first or any from the core module List::Util. (Update: And apparently Perl is getting builtin any and all.)

In general, you should use Text::CSV / Text::CSV_XS for parsing CSV instead of split, and if I am understanding your code correctly, my node Building Regex Alternations Dynamically might be a technique that's useful to you as well, as regexes could perhaps be faster than a linear search in an array. Update 2: Also Fletch has an excellent point about using a hash in the reply below.

Minor edits for clarity.

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Re^2: Question about loops and breaking out of them properly
by Fletch (Bishop) on Apr 18, 2025 at 13:48 UTC

    Another efficiency possibility would be to use a hash and exists (or treat it as a set where keys for members get set to 1). Precaffeine at the moment (so I believe this was the intent but not sure) but for what the op was trying setup a %valid_selections and then loop over the values passed setting $selected{$item} = 1 if exists $valid_selection{$item} then @selection = keys %selected.

    The cake is a lie.
    The cake is a lie.
    The cake is a lie.

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      Hi, and thank you for your feedback

      You're correct, I'm basically trying to recreate a list of some sort that I can iterate over later. I considered using a hash for this but in this case it's such a short list that it's probably faster to do this with a list.

      I realized later that I want to check the final list for duplicates, which I've fixed with the List::Util::uniq function (using this module is already paying off!). It adds an extra iteration over the final list but again, quite small in size, otherwise I would've also preferred to use a hash.

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Re^2: Question about loops and breaking out of them properly
by unmatched (Sexton) on Apr 18, 2025 at 12:54 UTC

    Thank you very much for your detailed input!

    In my case, there's not much more going on in the code and efficiency is not really a concern, as I'm working with very short lists of no more than maybe 5 elements or so. But I'd like to do things as "correctly" as possible which is why I was indeed looking to exit the lookup on the first match. Using first comes really in handy here, I'm glad that I asked as I obviously have a lot to learn about Perl. I'll be sure to read more about all these functions (thanks for the links!)/

    I'm calling split since it's such a short string anyway that it just seems more than enough. Plus, I'm intentionally restricting myself to the core modules to learn Perl more properly before I go out using other solutions, if that makes sense. At least for now, of course, as I'm not really making anything significant or complex, just small scripts for my own use.

    Just to clarify, this question refers to a simple script that can extract URL parameters out of a text file, with an option to provide the components to select from each match, like a specialized type of grep on the command line just for URLs:

    xurl --select domain,route file1 file2 ...
xurl --select proto,credentials file1 file2 ...

    [download]

    I'm taking my time to refine this script with better language features and cleaning it up, and this sort of questions come up from time to time.

    Thanks again!

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      I'm intentionally restricting myself to the core modules to learn Perl more properly before I go out using other solutions, if that makes sense.

      Sure, I understand. For other tasks, like say HTML parsing, there's several different good modules to choose from, but for CSV, Text::CSV_XS falls into the (small) group of modules that can always be recommended, since it's pretty much the standard CSV parsing module so it's worth learning in addition to core Perl.

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