So yesterday I posted this function:

sub clean_data
{
        my @fields = map
        {
                s/\s+/ /g;
                s/\|/-/g;
                s/^\s//;
                s/\s$//;
        } @_;
}

[download]

or something very similar. It's much cleaner now, thanks to feedback from other monks. Anyway it's being called as such:

foreach my $field ( @fieldnames )
{
    my $value = $q->param($field);
    clean_data( $value );
    push( @rec, $value );
}

[download]

What I don't understand is, the sub doesn't have a return statement, so why does it work? Where is it getting a return value from? @fields should be local to the sub, and well, I don't see anything else that would indicate a return value. Why does this function return something?

I'm going to look at the perlfunc page again (I still don't understand exactly what map {...} is doing), in the meantime if somebody can help make this make sense, that would be fabulous.

cheers

In reply to Global, Local, what the..? by antjock

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