http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1007357


in reply to while loop returning numbers not strings

OK took your code at face value and made some fundamental changes:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; while ($lines = <DATA>){ $word = split "", $lines; print $word."\n"; } print "\n\n"; exit 0; __END__ tutor teacher tinker sailor
and when I ran it got:
$ ./fix.pl Global symbol "$lines" requires explicit package name at ./fix.pl line + 5. Global symbol "$word" requires explicit package name at ./fix.pl line +6. Global symbol "$lines" requires explicit package name at ./fix.pl line + 6. Global symbol "$word" requires explicit package name at ./fix.pl line +8. Execution of ./fix.pl aborted due to compilation errors.
which is not too surprising. So the next set of changes:
#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; while (my $lines = <DATA>){ my $word = split "", $lines; print $word."\n"; } print "\n\n"; exit 0; __END__ tutor teacher tinker sailor
and now when we run it we get:
$ ./fix.pl 6 8 7 8
pretty much as you describe. So let's make another change:
#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; while (my $lines = <DATA>){ my ($word) = split "", $lines; print $word."\n"; } print "\n\n"; exit 0; __END__ tutor teacher tinker sailor
which gives us:
$ ./fix.pl t t t s
At this point I have a couple of comments to make:
  1. Remember: the function split() returns an array based on the regex designating where to split the string. In this case you pass in an empty string which causes your $lines variable to be split on every character. (was that your intention?)
  2. Without the enclosing parenthesis around $word you are using an array in a scalar context which means you are going to get the length of that array as a scalar not the value of the array itself.

Hope this helps you on your way....


Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg