SYNOPSIS question on Perl manauls

jaeh3ang has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, everyone ! Recently, the SYNOPSIS syntax has bothered me a lot. Please give me your guidance.

For example, when you see Data::Dumper documentation on http://perldoc.perl.org/Data/Dumper.html

You see the following Synopsis: 
print Data::Dumper->Dump([$foo, $bar], [qw(foo *ary)]);

Can you please tell me what [qw(foo *ary)] does mean?
Is it anonymous reference of an array ? what is "*ary" ?
Thank you in advance.

Comment on SYNOPSIS question on Perl manauls

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Re: SYNOPSIS question on Perl manauls by moritz (Cardinal) on Jan 11, 2012 at 18:31 UTC
`qw(...)` returns a list of whitespace separated strings. So at first the `ary` is only a string. It's Data::Dumper that's giving the string a special meaning. The second argument to `Dump` is an array ref of variable names. When you pass in `ary`, it makes the result a scalar if the data to dump is an ordinary scalar, but it because `@ary` if the data is an array reference: `$ perl -MData::Dumper -wE 'print Data::Dumper->Dump([[1, 2]], [q[$foo] +])' $foo = [ 1, 2 ]; $ perl -MData::Dumper -wE 'print Data::Dumper->Dump([[1, 2]], [q[foo] +])' @foo = ( 1, 2 ); $ perl -MData::Dumper -wE 'print Data::Dumper->Dump([{ a => 2}], [q[f +oo]])' %foo = ( 'a' => 2 );` [download] I guess that's in analogy to the typeglob syntax explained in perlmod. Perl 6 - second systems done right	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: SYNOPSIS question on Perl manauls by Corion (Patriarch) on Jan 11, 2012 at 18:34 UTC
See perlop on `qw()` (under "Quotes and Quote-like operators"), and perlref on `[...]`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]