Re^2: Looking for syntactic shortcut

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Re^3: Looking for syntactic shortcut by Thilosophy (Curate) on Jul 19, 2005 at 12:58 UTC
I dont know about `print`, but assignment to a scalar works fine: `perl -e 'print $a=(localtime())[5]' 105` [download] Update: Or, following BrowserUK: `perl -e 'print +(localtime())[5]' 105` [download] Update: But not (in response to socketdave): `perl -e 'print (localtime())[5]' syntax error at -e line 1, near ")[" Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.` [download] It seems we are hitting the finer points in the parser here...	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Looking for syntactic shortcut by socketdave (Curate) on Jul 19, 2005 at 13:00 UTC
look closer at Merlyn's example... you need '`(localtime())[5]`' instead of '`localtime()[5]`'...	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: Looking for syntactic shortcut by mrd (Beadle) on Jul 19, 2005 at 13:06 UTC
Yes! The extra parens did the trick. Thank you all.	[reply]
Re^3: Looking for syntactic shortcut by gellyfish (Monsignor) on Jul 19, 2005 at 13:03 UTC
Note that in your original post you had parentheses around the subroutine, these is also a slight gotcha in this example if you do: `perl -e'print (localtime())[5]'` [download] as the parser takes the outer parentheses to be the argument list of the `print` which obviously can't be subscripted meaningfully, in this case you will want to use the no-op unary plus to disambiguate the context of the subscript: `perl -e'print +(localtime())[5]'` [download] /J\	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Looking for syntactic shortcut by rev_1318 (Chaplain) on Jul 19, 2005 at 13:01 UTC
which should read: `print +(localtime)[5]` [download] (note the + before the opening bracet, to prevent print from thinking it's his. When assigning to a variable, you say: `my $year = (localtime)[5]` [download] just as you state in your own post :) Paul	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Looking for syntactic shortcut by virtualsue (Vicar) on Jul 19, 2005 at 13:01 UTC
That's not a very good test. Here's a very small program that does what you say you want: `#!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; sub retarray { my $param = shift; my @array=(1,2,3,4,5,56); return @array; } my $param = 2; my $val = (retarray($param))[3]; print "val is $val\n";` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Looking for syntactic shortcut by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Jul 19, 2005 at 13:02 UTC
Try: `perl -e "print((localtime)[5])"` [download] or: `perl -e "print+(localtime)[5]"` [download] Quiz: can you explain why: `perl -e "print (localtime)[5]"` [download] gives a syntax error?	[reply] [d/l] [select]