in reply to Re^2: Looking for pointers or optimizations.
in thread Looking for pointers or optimizations.

open (my $fh, "<", $ARGV[0]) or die "Can't open input file!";
my @words;
  ### The above die function should also return OS_ERROR if open funct
+ion failed
  ###  ... die "can't open file: $!";
while (<>) {
  ### <> will read from the STDIN not the filehandler $fh
  ### so that should be while(<$fh>){...}
    push(@words, $_);
}

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Re^4: Looking for pointers or optimizations.
by thmsdrew (Scribe) on Aug 21, 2012 at 14:20 UTC

    So if I put in while (<$fh>) it breaks my my $guess = <> further down in my code. I made that my $guess = <STDIN> and it works fine.

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      So if I put in while (<$fh>) it breaks my my $guess = <> further down in my code. I made that my $guess = <STDIN> and it works fine.

      both while(<>){..} and $guess = <> reads from STDIN. Atleast, that is obvious from your code. So, to make while(<fh>){.. work, you have to do this:

      my ($words_file) = @ARGV;
open( my $fh, "<", $words_file ) or die "can't open file: $!";
my @words;
while (<$fh>) {
  ...
}

## later you use
chomp(my $guess = <STDIN>);
...

      [download]
      Please, pay attention to the DIRECTION of the "arrow"
      • ">" is 'Writing to' ( OUTPUT )
      • "<" is 'Read from' ( INPUT )
      NOTE: Like I mentioned previously, you didn't close the your filehandle!!!

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        Hej, You probably didn't see this (marked with ####) 
        open(my $fh, "<", $ARGV[0]) or die "cannot open input file: $!";
my @words = <$fh>;
close $fh or die "cannot close input file: $!"; ##############
my $words = @words;

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        On the other hand, I don't understand the last line - you read a file into array with my @words = <$fh>; and then you assign it to a scalar variablemy $words = @words;.

        OK, you probably have your own reasons for that but you could manipulate array as good as scalar. And you could read a file directly in a scalar variable. my $words = <$fh>;

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