Perl Style: Negative Array Subscripts

Jan 1, 1998 by Tom Christiansen

• To get the last element in a list or array, use $array[-1] instead of $array[$#array]. The former works on both lists and arrays, but the latter does not.

• Remember that substr, index, rindex, and splice also accept negative subscripts to count back from the end.

      split(@array, -2);   # pop twice
  

• Remember substr is lvaluable:

      substr($s, -10) =~ s/ /./g;
  

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Copyright © 1998, Tom Christiansen All rights reserved.