[ale] OFFTOPIC: Perl -w oddities?

[Mike Fletcher]

>>>>> "Nomad" == Nomad the Wanderer <nomad at orci.com> writes:


    Nomad> I ended up using @Name in the split isntead of $Name,
    Nomad> otherwise I loose values if the name has spaces in it.  If
    Nomad> I wanted to do:

    Nomad>      ( $Track, $Name ) = (split( ' ', $_, 4 ))[1,3];

    Nomad> but instead of 3, do 3-eol, what would I do?

	That's in effect what the third argument to split (the 4)
does.  That tells split that you want it to split $_ on whitespace
into at most 4 fields.  So if you had:

Zagnut	Frobnitz	Spam	This is the rest

    $Track would be `Frobnitz' and $Name would be `This is the rest'.
`perldoc -f split' explains this (and the difference between splitting 
on ' ' and /\s*/).

    Nomad> The print statements give me this:

    Nomad> $Track `01' $Name: `The Dam At Otter Creek' 
[...]

    Nomad> so they are all initialized.  It also complains because I'm
    Nomad> using @Name with $Track, saying it should be associative.

	Are you trying to do:

$Hash{ $Track } = @Name;

	Or what?  In that case, you'ld be storing the size (number of
elements) of @Name, not the contents of @Name.

    Nomad> I guess it's interpiting the 01 as a string.  Know a way to
    Nomad> clean this up?  Using it as a numeric works fine.

	Hash keys are always strings (e.g. `1' and `01' are distinct
keys in the hash).  You could always use sprintf to normalize your
digits to zero-filled/non-zero-filled before using them as keys.

-- 
Fletch                |                                            __`'/|
fletch at phydeaux.org   |       "I drank what?" -- Socrates          \ o.O'
678 443-6239(w)       |                                            =(___)=
                      |                                               U