SAMS Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours THIRD EDITION

Hour 4. Stacking Building Blocks: Lists and Arrays

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• How to fill and empty arrays

• How to examine arrays element by element

• How to sort and print arrays

• How to split scalars into arrays and join arrays back into scalars

Scalars are Perl's singular nouns. They can represent any one thing—a word, a record, a document, a line of text, or a character. Often, though, you need to talk about collections of things—many words, a few records, two documents, fifty lines of text, or a dozen characters.

When you need to talk about many things in Perl, you use list data. You can represent list data in three different ways: by using lists, arrays, and hashes.

Lists are the simplest representation of list data. A list is simply a group ...