Only if you don't want to process the rest of the items in @$data. I suspect you really want to use next instead of last so you can advance to the next one.

Further, that's a rather C-ish loop. Might I suggest something like this:

for my $item (@$data) {
   if (defined($$item{email}) and $$item{email} ne '') {
      good("Email found.");
   }
   else {
      bad("No email address.");
      next;
   }
   ...other stuff...
}
[download]

...roboticus

There's no reason to separate the error check from the error message in this code.

for my $item (@$data) {
   if (!defined($item->{email}) || $item->{email} eq '') {
      bad("No email address.");
      next;
   }

   good("Email found.");
   ...other stuff...
}
[download]

Curses! That wily De Morgan has eluded me yet again!

...roboticus

  my @names_with_no_email = map {$_->{email} eq '' ? $_->{name}:()} @$
+data;
[download]

Why map and not grep?

chromatic,
Why map and not grep?

Perhaps I am missing something, but grep doesn't look reasonable here. This is both filtering and transforming which makes me think map. In addition to filtering hash references based on the 'email' key, it returning the value of the 'name' key. I can't think of a way to do that with grep that is clear but please feel free to elucidate me?

Cheers - L~R

  for (my $i = 0; $i < @{$data}; $i++) {
  
    my $email  = $data->[$i]{'email'} || '';
    my $name   = $data->[$i]{'name'} || '';
    
    unless ($email) {    
      bad("No email address."); 
      last;
     }else{
            good("Email found.");
            }
 }
[download]

This does not test for validity of the email, of course, but presumably you do that elsewhere. And presumably the good and bad subroutines are defined somewhere.

But to quote from one of the holy books (Perl Best Pratices, Chapter 6.4):

Don't use unless or until at all.

So instead if unless($email) rather use if(! $email)

Damian is sometimes _wrong. Shhh! Don't tell anyone.

I prefer unless() as a suffix. I do agree that an unless() block should not have an else ... negating the negation warps my mind this early on a Monday morning. But it doesn't need one, since the next / last goes to the next iteration of the loop.

As Occam said: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.