creating array refs

agoth has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I thought that \( list ) and [ list ] did the same thing but apparently not,
Can someone explain why the first structure below works while the second doesnt?

@ary = ('item1:value1:text1', 'item2:value2:text2');     
for (@ary) {
    push @flibble, [ split /:/, $_ ];
}

for (@ary) {
    push @flibble, \(split /:/, $_ );
}

# then 
for (@flibble) {
    print "row : @{ $_ } \n"; # to test
}
[download]

Thanks.

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RE: creating array refs by Boogman (Scribe) on Aug 21, 2000 at 22:32 UTC
`\( element1, element2, ... )` takes a reference to each element in the list and returns that list (i.e. `( \element1, \element2, \... )` whereas `[ element1, element2, ... ]` returns a reference to an array containing those elements. When you push the results of taking a refererence to a list into @fibble, you add a reference to each element in the list individually, as opposed to adding a reference to an array containing those elements as you do using the anonymous array composers `[]`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: creating array refs by btrott (Parson) on Aug 21, 2000 at 22:19 UTC
\(list) isn't valid syntax. And that's what you're doing with split, because split returns a list. You can't take a reference to a list; you can only use a list to build an anonymous array ref. \@array is valid syntax, because you can take a reference to an array. The difference is, LIST creates a new anonymous array reference and fills it with LIST; \@ARRAY takes a reference to an existing array.	[reply]