How to Convert Array References in Perl

Perl, a practical extraction and report language, is a high-level programming language you use in Web applications and data processing. As other languages of this type, Perl offers you the feature to dynamically allocate memory at run-time and refer to it via references, similar to C pointers. A reference contains a description of data type and a pointer to a location in memory. You can use Perl references to refer to an array variable, and dereference to return the data in the array.

Instructions

1. Type the following code to create a reference to a constant array:

   $array_reference = [1, 5, 10, 100];

   If you print "$array_reference" you will see something along the lines of:

   ARRAY(0x80f6c6c)

2. Type the following code to create a reference to an existing array:

   $array_reference = \@some_Array;

3. Place the '@' operator before the reference variable to dereference the array reference:

   @my_array_data = @$array_reference;

   If you were to print this, using the data in Step 1, you would see:

   1 5 10 100

4. Type the "->" arrow operator as below to dereference an element of the referenced array:

   $first_array_element = $array_reference->[0];

   This would return the value "1" using the example array from above.

References

• Perlmeme.org: Dereferencing in Perl