Re^2: regexp list return 5.6 vs 5.8

OK, one more question: How do you guys recommend that I flatten lists? I mean... say I have some values in an array, or in two arrays and I want to turn it into one flat list that will not have any array-specific or similar behavior.

You flatten lists like this:

my @newarray = @oldarray;
my @newarray = (@oldarray1, @oldarray2);
my @newarray = (@oldarray, 2, 3, qw( foo bar baz ) );
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But your question doesn't make a lot of sense. You seem to be asking "How do I make an array that isn't an array", and the answer to that is "You can't".

If you're trying to ask "How do I return different values from a function depending on the calling context", then look into wantarray as shmem suggests.

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Re^3: regexp list return 5.6 vs 5.8
by almut (Canon) on Jan 25, 2008 at 06:03 UTC

I think the OP is essentially asking (Sixtease please correct me if I'm wrong) how you would make something like the following snippet print "e", and not "2"

my @x = qw(a b c);
my @y = qw(d e);
print scalar (@x, @y);       # prints "2" (number of elems in @y)
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treating the combined arrays as if they had been written like

print scalar qw(a b c d e);  # prints "e" (last elem in list)
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Kind of like this

print scalar ((@x, @y)[0..@x+@y-1]);      # prints "e"
print scalar sub {@_[0..$#_]}->(@x, @y);  # prints "e"
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but less ugly, and without having to take special care of the subtle problem you run into with older versions of Perl when the arrays are empty, and the selecting range for the slice becomes [0..-1] (what this thread is about, essentially).

Irrespective of whether you'd actually need to do something like this in real-life programming, it's still a valid question in and of itself, IMO.

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