Re: Accessing previous element of an array in a 'foreach' loop

On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Carl Rogers wrote:

> Good day;
>
> I'm using foreach to do something to an array. is there a way I can
> reference a previously 'seen' element without having to traverse the array
> with a for(;;) statement?
>
> ie. I'd like this to work:
>
> foreach(@array) {
>
> 	if ($_ =~/somecondition/) {
> 	# I want to do something to the element prior to $_ ($_ - 1)
> 	}
> }

The problem here is that $_ is a *copy* of the element in the array --
modifying it does not modify the array (I think in earlier versions it was
actually an alias, which, I have read, led to all sorts of abuse), so
without some kind of a counter, you will not have any knowledge of the
previous value.

You can avoid using the C-ish for loop and use a Perlish one (for is an
alias for foreach... or is it the other way around?), if you want to
actually modify something in the array:

foreach(0..$#array) {
  if ($array[$_] =~ /something/) {
	$array[$_ - 1] = 'something';
}

-- Brett
                                          http://www.chapelperilous.net/
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• Accessing previous element of an array in a 'foreach' loop by Carl Rogers
• RE: Accessing previous element of an array in a 'foreach' loop by Nikola Janceski
• Re: Accessing previous element of an array in a 'foreach' loop by Brett W. McCoy
• Re: Accessing previous element of an array in a 'foreach' loop by Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan
• Re: Accessing previous element of an array in a 'foreach' loop by Jenda Krynicky
• Re: Accessing previous element of an array in a 'foreach' loop by Brett W. McCoy
• Re: Accessing previous element of an array in a 'foreach' loop by Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan