Re: Re: Make things a *little* easier

the advantage this has over the 4-arg substr is that you don't need to put the number of chars to replace in the string (which would always be the absolute value of the negative offset in situations like this);

I noticed that. If you leave off the argument, it automatically takes the rest of the chars to the end. If you want to give a 4th argument, you can't leave off the 3rd.

But, shouldn't passing undef for the 3rd argument mean the same thing as leaving it off? That's what I would expect.

Comment on Re: Re: Make things a little easier

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Re: Re: Re: Make things a little easier by mdillon (Priest) on Sep 12, 2002 at 15:37 UTC
Yes. Using `undef` as the third argument does have that effect. I suspect Perl 6 will improve on this somewhat by being able to do: `substr $str, -1, replace => '';` This may not seem like much of an improvement, but it gets rid of the `undef`, which could possibly be mysterious to the uninitiated (as could lvalue `substr`). Update: yikes! Using `undef` doesn't actually work like this (i.e. as the third arg in a Perl-5 `substr`). I had assumed it did, but it actually acts the same as using 0 as the third arg (at least with 5.8.0). Anyways, the lvalue behavior is stable and documented since 5.6 (possibly earlier); if `undef` works like this in any Perl version, I haven't seen it documented. Sorry for the foolish mistake (and for the unfounded assumption).	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Make things a little easier by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Sep 12, 2002 at 16:06 UTC
Now that would be something I'd like to see in Perl 6 (and which I have missed in the Perl 5 version of the function on a number of occasions). Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]
Re^4: Make things a little easier by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Sep 12, 2002 at 20:03 UTC
You seem to be getting different results than mdillon. That's the problem with relying on undocumented details. If you write a sub starting with `my ($a,$b,$c,$d)=@_;` and then calculate defaults if undef or use the undef value for some special meaning, then leaving off args naturally gives the same results. But if you write `if (scalar(@_) < 4) ...` to do something different, then using undef doesn't give the same effect.	[reply] [d/l] [select]