If you already have all of the data in memory it doesn't do much good to keep passing it out piecemeal like that. If you were reading from a file, you could use your function to read a single line and return an array of each split piece of that line in a fashion similer to fetchrow. If you really do want to pass out pieces of a pre-existing array like that, though, you can do it like this:
my @array = ([1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9]); # non-destructive my $index = 0; sub nextitem { return if $index > $#array; return @{$array[$index++]}; } # more elegant, but destroys @array sub nextitem { return unless @array; return @{shift(@array)}; }
Is this what you meant?

In reply to Re: Returning Array of Arrays (OOP) by Fastolfe
in thread Returning Array of Arrays (OOP) by Anonymous Monk

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