Being the fledgling Perl Programmer that I am and trying to learn about the "splice" function, I searched the Monastery for "splice". Then being somewhat confused about the description I searched my handy/dandy Programming Perl book and found the same equally cryptic text. I thought that I would use "splice" to remove elements from an array. But, I'm getting confused as to the syntax. Below is a small program that I wrote to test the function.


#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
# this is a test of the splice command
#
#
#
use strict;
my $x = "how about this";
my $y = "this is the new line";
open (IN_FILE, "test.dat") or die "test.dat will not open: $!\n";
my @ary = <IN_FILE>;
close (IN_FILE) or die "test.dat will not close: $!\n";
#
print "Print the array before the change:\n @ary\n";

my $z = splice (@ary,$x,2);
print "Printing the array:\n @ary\n\n\n";
print $z;

[download]


This is the output:

Print the array before the change:
this is a column|this is another|this is a also on
this could be|a column is this|and so is this
how about this|or maybe this| of this

Argument "how about this" isn't numeric in splice at ./test.pl line 16.
Print the array after the change:
how about this|or maybe this| of this



Print the splice value:this could be|a column is this|and so is this

I must be missing the point of the function.

"The Universe is not only more complex than we imagine, it is more complex than we can imagine." - Albert Einstein

In reply to A Splice of life by void

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