If you want named elements, use a hash instead.

my %hash = (
    myvar => 3,
    name  => 'Ovid',
);
print $hash{name};

[download]

If the order of elements is important, you could use Tie::Hash::Indexed or something similar.

In any event, I would be careful about wanting to alias one variable to another. This can result in "action at a distance" problems and those can be hard to debug.

Finally, if you always know which index you wanted to access by name, you could try a constant:

use constant NAME => 2;
print $array[NAME];

[download]

However, if you really, really want to be evil and alias a variable to an array element, then you can do the following. How this works is an exercise left to the reader :)

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my @array = qw( foo bar baz );
my $var = alias_to(\@array, 1);

print $var;

sub alias_to { $_[0]->[$_[1]] }

[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.

In reply to Re: use simple scalar names to point to specific array elements by Ovid
in thread use simple scalar names to point to specific array elements by Sandy

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