This is somewhat embarassing, since I'm sure the answer to this question is to be found in many good perl books. But I suspect the answer is probably pretty simple to someone who has the "perl mentality", so I'm hoping your replies will aid me in gaining said mentality. I used to program Tcl, and since changing to perl, often find myself wanting an 'lsearch' function. I tend to add it so: 
sub lsearch {
  my $item = shift;
  my @array = @_;
  foreach (0..$#array) {
    if ($item eq $array[$_]) {
      return $_;
    }
  }
  return "";
}

# Want to remove $item from @list
unless (my $index = lsearch($item, @list) eq "") {
  splice(@list, $index, 1);
}

[download]
I think that in some cases where I used to use 'lsearch', I could now be using 'grep', but what do you do when you want the index of an item in your list? Or do you just program to avoid such cases?

In reply to lsearch for perl? by matt.tovey

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