First of all, always run your code examples under "use strict" and "use warnings" -- they'll almost always give you hints when you don't get what you expect

On your first question, the first foreach is using "." (concatenate) instead of an assignment.

foreach (@step) {
  $step = $step . $_;  # or shorthand: $step .= $_
}

[download]

If you ran your code with warnings, you'd get this message:

Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string

On your second question, it's a little garbled as to what you're trying to do. For one, you're not using regular expression delimiters:

$_ =~ /($what){3}/  # match things in $what 3 times

[download]

Second, I'm not sure what you mean by "print three times", but the regex /(fred|barney){3}/ means to match any combination of "fred" or "barney" that appears three times in a row, e.g. "fredfredfred" or "fredbarneyfred" or any combination like that. I'm not sure that's what you intended.

Hope that helps

-xdg

Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

In reply to Re: I'm reading a book! It's given me more questons! by xdg
in thread I'm reading a book! It's given me more questons! by Petras

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