CODEWITHSUNDEEP
arraysperliterationdata-manipulation
comatose
comatose

Reputation: 1962

perl, removing elements from array in for loop

will the following code always work in perl ?

for loop iterating over @array {
  # do something
  if ($condition) {
     remove current element from @array
  }
}

Because I know in Java this results in some Exceptions, The above code is working for me for now, but I want to be sure that it will work for all cases in perl. Thanks

Upvotes: 5

Views: 7078

Answers (1)

raina77ow
raina77ow

Reputation: 106375

Well, it's said in the doc:

If any part of LIST is an array, foreach will get very confused if you add or remove elements within the loop body, for example with splice. So don't do that.

It's a bit better with each:

If you add or delete a hash's elements while iterating over it, entries may be skipped or duplicated--so don't do that. Exception: In the current implementation, it is always safe to delete the item most recently returned by each(), so the following code works properly:

 while (($key, $value) = each %hash) {
    print $key, "\n";
    delete $hash{$key}; # This is safe
  }

But I suppose the best option here would be just using grep:

@some_array = grep {
  # do something with $_
  some_condition($_);
} @some_array;

Upvotes: 12

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