How do I pass variables to my subroutines?

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Say I have a sub called &reverse_word that, well, reverses whatever word I send to it. How do I send that 'word' to the sub routine and how do I go about returning a it (ie, the word reversed)?
Could I do something like this:

$word = "cheese"; <BR>
$reversed = &reverse_word($word); <BR>
[download]

-thanks

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.

Comment on How do I pass variables to my subroutines? Download Code

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Re: How do I pass variables to my subroutines? by Fastolfe (Vicar) on Jan 24, 2001 at 22:24 UTC
Please read perlsub, perhaps perlsyn, and a good introductory Perl book such as "Learning Perl". Briefly, arguments to subroutines are passed via the special `@_` array (see perlvar). Use shift to pull these out one-at-a-time, access elements of this array individually, or pull them all out at once via a list assignment. Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: How do I pass variables to my subroutines? by Fastolfe (Vicar) on Jan 24, 2001 at 22:25 UTC
Additionally, this specific task can be solved by making use of the built-in reverse function, which, in a scalar context, reverses the string character-wise, which seems to be what you want. Also read perlfunc. Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.	[reply]
Re: How do I pass variables to my subroutines? by kilinrax (Deacon) on Jan 24, 2001 at 22:35 UTC
Well, for a start, you can use '`scalar reverse $word`' to reverse a word. If you were using '`&reverse_word`' as simply an example, then I'd recommend reading up on shift and return; `sub reverse_word() { my $word = shift; my $reversedword = scalar reverse $word; return $reversedword; }` [download] or, more consisely: `sub reverse_word() { return scalar reverse shift; }` [download] Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.	[reply] [d/l] [select]