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Perl Cookbook
book

Perl Cookbook

by Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington
August 1998
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
800 pages
39h 20m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Perl Cookbook

Appending One Array to Another

Problem

You want to join two arrays by appending all the elements of one to the end of the other.

Solution

Use push:

# push
push(@ARRAY1, @ARRAY2);

Discussion

The push function is optimized for appending a list to the end of an array. You can take advantage of Perl’s list flattening to join two arrays, but it results in significantly more copying than push:

@ARRAY1 = (@ARRAY1, @ARRAY2);

Here’s an example of push in action:

@members = ("Time", "Flies");
@initiates = ("An", "Arrow");
push(@members, @initiates);
# @members is now ("Time", "Flies", "An", "Arrow")

If you want to insert the elements of one array into the middle of another, use the splice function:

splice(@members, 2, 0, "Like", @initiates);
print "@members\n";
splice(@members, 0, 1, "Fruit");
splice(@members, -2, 2, "A", "Banana");
print "@members\n";

This is output:

               
                  Time Flies Like An Arrow
               
                  Fruit Flies Like A Banana

See Also

The splice and push functions in perlfunc(1) and Chapter 3 of Programming Perl; the “List Values and Arrays” section of Chapter 2 of Programming Perl; the “List Value Constructors” section of perldata(1)

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565922433Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata