Hello, I'm embarrassed to ask such a trivial question, but I couldn't find anything searching Perlmonks or the Net. Consider a function that returns a real list (not a reference), and you are only interested in a particular element. Some standard modules behave like this, e.g. File::Spec->splitpath.

This does not work:

my $name = File::Spec->splitpath($path)[2];

This works, but it's ugly:

my $name;
{
    my @dummy = File::Spec->splitpath($path);
    $name = $dummy[2];
}

[download]

Running through an intermediate anonymous array seems unnecessarily complex to me:

my $name = [ File::Spec->splitpath($path) ]->[2];

Many thanks for pointing me to a more elegant way!

In reply to How to access directly an element of an array / list returned by a function? by vic2608

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