in reply to Re: How would you shorten this regexp conditional?
in thread How would you shorten this regexp conditional?

my $color = ('b','w')[$white =~ /princepawn/];

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Beware.. I've been burned by code like that. In a list context (which the indicies of a suffix part is eval'ed in), that's an empty list return for false, not "0", so you end up with an empty list value, and $color is undef, not the first item! You need a scalar inside the brackets to get it right, as in: 
my $color = ('b','w')[scalar $white =~ /princepawn/];

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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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Re: Re: Re: How would you shorten this regexp conditional?
by japhy (Canon) on Jan 25, 2002 at 19:07 UTC
    Except that this is in scalar context because of the scalar assignment. Had I mistakenly written my($color) = ..., then I agree I would have been burned, and rightly so.

    _____________________________________________________
    Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
    s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

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      Egad! Since when did the context of the literal slice propogate down into the right side of the slice? This is news to me. It was not that way when I invented it in Perl 3. {sigh} It must've changed in Perl5, because I'm sure I got burned by this in Perl4.

      -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

      On further investigation, it appears that wantarray is true inside the subscript, but some sort of DWIMmery is happening. Ick!
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