Efficient for what? Speed or maintainability? Assigning a reference is pretty low cost and lexical variables are slightly more efficient. It's probably much of a muchness either way but you should benchmark if you need to know. 

use Benchmark;

cmpthese ( -1, {
    local => sub { ... },
    value => sub { ... },
);

[download]

Personally I'd use lexical variables and if copying was expensive or I wanted to modify the arguments use $_[0] etc or Data::Alias if I refer to an argument more than once or need to document it's purpose. For example 

use Data::Alias;

sub sample {
    alias $html = $_[0];
    ...
}

[download]

In reply to Re: using local and pass by reference method by hipowls
in thread using local and pass by reference method by bipinbalan

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.