Perl Cookbook

Finding the First List Element That Passes a Test

Problem

You want the first element in the list (or its index) that passes a test. Alternatively, you want to know whether any element passes the test. The test can be simple identity (“Is this element in the list?”)^[7] or more complex (“I have a list of Employee objects, sorted from highest salary to lowest. Which manager has the highest salary?”). Simple cases normally only require the value of the element, but when the array itself will be altered, you probably need to know the index number of the first matching element.

Solution

To find a matching value, use foreach to loop over every element, and call last as soon as you find a match:

my($match, $found, $item);
foreach $item (@array) {
    if ($criterion) {
        $match = $item;  # must save
        $found = 1;
        last;
    }
}
if ($found) {
    ## do something with $match
} else {
    ## unfound
}

To find a matching index, use for to loop a variable over every array index, and call last as soon as you find a match:

my($i, $match_idx);
for ($i = 0; $i < @array; $i++) {
    if ($criterion) {
        $match_idx = $i;    # save the index
        last;
    }
}

if (defined $match_idx) {
    ## found in $array[$match_idx]
} else {
    ## unfound
}

Discussion

Not having a built-in mechanism to do this, we must write our own code to go through the list and test each element. We use foreach and for and call last to ensure that we stop as soon as we find a match. Before we use last to stop looking, though, we save the value or index.

A common mistake is to try to use grep here. The problem is that grep always tests all elements and finds all matches, so it’s inefficient if you only want the first match.

We have to set $match when we want the value of the first matching element. We can’t just test $item at the end of the loop, because foreach automatically localizes the iterator variable and this prevents us from getting to its last loop value after the loop ends. See Section 4.4.

Here’s an example. Assume that @employees has a list of Employee objects, sorted in descending order by salary. We wish to find out the highest paid engineer, who will be the first engineer in the array. We only want to print the engineer’s name, so we want the value, not the index.

foreach $employee (@employees) {
    if ( $employee->category() eq 'engineer' ) {
        $highest_engineer = $employee;
        last;
    }
}
print "Highest paid engineer is: ", $highest_engineer->name(), "\n";

When we’re searching and only want the index, we can save some code by remembering that $i will not be an acceptable array index if we don’t find a match. This mainly saves us code space, as not doing an assignment doesn’t really win us much compared to the time we’ll have spent testing the list elements. It’s more obscure, because it tests if ($i < @ARRAY) to check whether we found a match, instead of the more obvious defined test as in the previous Solution.

for ($i = 0; $i < @ARRAY; $i++) {
    last if $criterion;
}
if ($i < @ARRAY) {
    ## found and $i is the index
} else {
    ## not found
}

See Also

The “For Loops,” “Foreach Loops,” and “Loop Control” sections of perlsyn (1) and Chapter 2 of Programming Perl ; the grep function in perlfunc(1) and Chapter 3 of Programming Perl

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^[7] But why didn’t you use a hash then?