Hi Monks

I'm new to references and having a tough time understanding how to use them, even after checking out perlreftut. I'm trying to pass an array to a subroutine makeSql and then iterate over each of the members of the array. For now I'm just printing out the members as a string while I figure out how to get this to work. Later this subroutine will use each of the items in this array as part of a SQL select statement.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my @xpid = ("ahuman","alienh","pmonk");

my $sql = makeSql(\@xpid);
warn "$sql\n";

sub makeSql {
  my @xpid = shift;
  my $return;
  my $i = 0;
  foreach my $item (@xpid) {
    $return .= $xpid[$i];
    $i++;
  }
  return $return;
}
[download]

As you probably already know, this warns something like ARRAY(0x8100a38). Can anyone show me how to use references properly to pass an array to a subroutine and iterate through that array? I've figured out that w my current code I can delete the for loop, assign the global \@xpid to a scalar and do something like $return = $xpid[0] and get a value... but how do I work w/ an array w/out using the global?

AH

Using perl 5.6.1 unless otherwise noted.
Apache 1.3.27 unless otherwise noted.
Redhat 7.1 unless otherwise noted.
[download]