Subroutine performing operation on variable submitted to it...

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

Wasn't sure what to put in the title of the queston. I'm a little confused by the following behavior. I'm trying to strip the HTML tags from a variable and save that value to another variable. I have the following code:

$item->{'notag_title'}=&strip_tags($item->{'title'});

sub strip_tags { $_[0]=~s/<[^>]+>//gs; return $_[0]; }
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As expected $item->{'notag_title'} becomes a tag-less version of $item->{'title'}. But $item->{'title'} loses its tags too! I don't understand it at all. Is $_[0] a reference to the original variable, not a variable local to the subroutine?

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Re: Subroutine performing operation on variable submitted to it... by davido (Cardinal) on Nov 24, 2011 at 07:41 UTC
The answer is in perlsub. `$_[0]` becomes an alias to the sub's parameter. In this case, that param is `$item->{'title'}`, so the change ripples back as you've experienced. Do it this way: `sub strip_tags{ my $string = shift; # Or my $string = $_[0]; $string =~ s/<[^>]+>//gs; return $string; }` [download] With that method you're making a copy of the string and working on it. Dave	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Subroutine performing operation on variable submitted to it... by Eliya (Vicar) on Nov 24, 2011 at 07:38 UTC
The elements of `@_` are aliases to the arguments passed to the routine. "Alias" means you can access the same data under a different variable name. If you modify `$_[0]`, you modify the original argument/value. It's not a reference in the sense of how the word is used in Perl context, because in this case you'd have to dereference it.	[reply] [d/l] [select]