return all arrays created by function

[nawlej]

What is the easiest way to return all of the arrays created by a function when the names are not staticly defined by the function?

 

[Coderifous]

in your function, push a reference to each dynamically created array INTO another array. This being solution to your question, I have to imagine that the problem you are solving might be better served from some refactoring.

sub make_lists {
  my @all_dem_arrays;
  
  #bullshit creation of dynamically named arrays
  for(@_){
    my @{$_} = qw/1 2 3/; # this is your non-statically named array
    push @all_dem_arrays, \@{$_};  # this is you pushing a reference to it
  }

  return @all_dem_arrays;  # this is you returning a list of those reference
}

my @lists = make_lists('blondes', 'brunettes', 'redheads');

# and here you are proving that it worked
foreach my $list ( @lists ){
  print join(', ' => @{$list}), "\n";
}

But I digress - becuase this solution basically sucks. You would probably be better off NOT dynamicallly naming arrays, and just using a hash-of-arrays instead.

--jim

 

[missbarbell]

Not quite sure what you mean by this. Perhaps a short piece of code to give us a clue as to the type of array and naming you are using.

Although if you are saying you are creating lots of names on the fly, you could store the names and contents within a hash and return them something like:

{
  my %names;
  $names{$array1name} = \@array1;
  $names{$array2name} = \@array2;
  return map {@{$names{$_}}} keys %names; 
                       # returns all array values as single list
  return values %names # returns refs to each array
}

Although I suspect you're trying to do something slightly different to that.

Barbie
Leader of Birmingham Perl Mongers

http://birmingham.pm.org

 

[nawlej]

Yeah I ended up doing it as a hash.