Beginning Perl Programming: From Novice to Professional

© William "Bo" Rothwell of One Course Source, Inc. 2019

William "Bo" RothwellBeginning Perl Programminghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5055-6_4

4. Associative Array Variables

William “Bo” Rothwell¹ 

(1)

San Diego, CA, USA

 

Associative Array Variables

Consider the situation in which you are keeping track of dog names in an array:

@dogs=qw(Fido Spot Teddy Rex);

You also want to keep track of the owners of these dogs. One way we can do this is to create a second array:

@owners=qw(Bob Sue Fred Sally);

This, however, isn’t the best solution. While not impossible, this method will be cumbersome because you will have to maintain two arrays (and carefully too!).

The problem with arrays is that the indexing system is already predefined.

@dogs		@owners
Index	Value