"last? Or maybe should be next? Do you intend to jump out of the loop, or don’t you instead really mean, continue it?"

The loop for ($data) { ... } only executes once.

Neither last nor next will make it execute any more or less times.

When a match is found and the captured data is assigned to a variable, that's the last thing to be done.

Here's what the last documentation says:

"The last command is like the break statement in C (as used in loops); it immediately exits the loop in question."

That's what we want to do here: immediately exit the loop.

Here's what the next documentation says:

"The next command is like the continue statement in C; it starts the next iteration of the loop"

That's not what we want to do here: it's a one-pass loop; there are no more iterations.

[You might like to follow the link I provided in my original reply. It has two more code examples where last is used to exit one-pass loops.]

-- Ken

In reply to Re^3: Help with code optimization by kcott
in thread Help with code optimization by hyu968

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