I'm not sure if shift (@results) . $line; and shift @results . $line would work differently. It depends on whether the order of operations gives precedence to . or to handing an argument to a function. My guess is that . gets precedence, in which case shift @results . $line; will give you something weird that you don't want.
I suggest you look up the perldocs on shift, but basically if you have any array, like: my @arr = ('a', 'b', 'c'); the result of: print shift (@arr); will be: a and @arr will now only be: ('b', 'c') In other words, it takes the first element off of the array. It is often used to get arguments to a function: sub foo { my $arg1 = shift; my $arg2 = shift; print $arg1 . " " . $arg2; } foo ("hello", "world"); would print: hello world So, shift (@results) . $line; is taking the next value from @results and appending $line to it. That value will then be the next value in @newresults. It takes a bit of getting used to. I suggest reading a little about functional programming to fully grasp the list manipulation functions like map, grep, split, join, etc. -David On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 14:37:28 -0500, Errin Larsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 15:01:34 -0400, David Greenberg > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Opps, I missed that. Instead of: > > @results = map { my $line = $_; chomp $line; $line =~ s/\s+//g; $line } (@data); > > try: > > my @newresults = map { my $line = $_; chomp $line; $line =~ s/\s+//g; > > shift (@results) . $line } (@data); > > @results = @newresults; > > > > -David > > > > Ok ... please forgive my n00b-ness, but can you help me understand a > couple of things here. This part: > > shift (@results) . $line > > Is it the same as: > > shift @results . $line > > I'm thinking "no". But I don't know what the difference is. I also > don't understand what exactly that shift is doing, but if I understand > the difference with the parens maybe It'll start to make more sense to > me. > > --Errin > -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>