Perl 101 (Part 3) - Looping The Loop - Playing With Friends
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Now that you've got the basics of array variables down, it's time for us to introduce the "foreach" loop, one of the most useful control structures in Perl for dealing with array variables. It looks like this:

foreach some_scalar_variable (some_array_variable)
	{
	do this!
	}

Here's an example:

#!/usr/bin/perl

@friends = ("Rachel", "Monica", "Phoebe", "Chandler", "Joey", "Ross");

foreach $item (@friends)
	{
	print("$item is a true Friend!\n");
	}

And the output is:

Rachel is a true Friend!
Monica is a true Friend!
Phoebe is a true Friend!
Chandler is a true Friend!
Joey is a true Friend!
Ross is a true Friend!

The "foreach" loop works its way through the elements of an array, assigning each element to the defined scalar variable, and then executing the statements within the curly braces. In the example above, each subsequent iteration of the loop sees a new value being assigned to the scalar variable $item - this continues as many times as there are elements in the array. Once all the array elements are exhausted, the statements following the loop are executed.

An important point to note here is that the scalar variable used in the "foreach" loop is only assigned a value temporarily - once the loop has finished executing, the original value of the scalar variable, if any, is restored. Take a look:

#!/usr/bin/perl

@friends = ("Rachel", "Monica", "Phoebe", "Chandler", "Joey", "Ross");
$item = "Superman";

foreach $item (@friends)
	{
	print("$item is a true Friend!\n");
	}

print ("Loop done!\n");
print ('The value of $item is now ', $item);

Here's what you'll get

Rachel is a true Friend!
Monica is a true Friend!
Phoebe is a true Friend!
Chandler is a true Friend!
Joey is a true Friend!
Ross is a true Friend!
Loop done!
The value of $item is now Superman

This article copyright Melonfire 2000. All rights reserved.

>>> More Perl Articles          >>> More By Vikram Vaswani and Harish Kamath, (c) Melonfire