Re^2: Looking for syntactic shortcut

[mrd]

Ummm .... yes I did:

# perl -e "print localtime()[5]"
syntax error at -e line 1, near ")["
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

[Thilosophy]

I dont know about print, but assignment to a scalar works fine:

perl -e 'print $a=(localtime())[5]'
105

Update: Or, following BrowserUK:

perl -e 'print +(localtime())[5]'
105

Update: But not (in response to socketdave):

perl -e 'print (localtime())[5]'
syntax error at -e line 1, near ")["
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

It seems we are hitting the finer points in the parser here...

[socketdave]

look closer at Merlyn's example... you need '(localtime())[5]' instead of 'localtime()[5]'...

[mrd]

Yes!

The extra parens did the trick.

Thank you all.

[gellyfish]

Note that in your original post you had parentheses around the subroutine, these is also a slight gotcha in this example if you do:

 perl -e'print (localtime())[5]'

as the parser takes the outer parentheses to be the argument list of the print which obviously can't be subscripted meaningfully, in this case you will want to use the no-op unary plus to disambiguate the context of the subscript:

 perl -e'print +(localtime())[5]'

/J\

[rev_1318]

which should read:

print +(localtime)[5]

(note the + before the opening bracet, to prevent print from thinking it's his. When assigning to a variable, you say:

my $year = (localtime)[5]

just as you state in your own post :)

[virtualsue]

That's not a very good test. Here's a very small program that does what you say you want:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

sub retarray {
   my $param = shift;
   my @array=(1,2,3,4,5,56);
   return @array;
}
my $param = 2;
my $val = (retarray($param))[3];
print "val is $val\n";

[eyepopslikeamosquito]

Try:

perl -e "print((localtime)[5])"

or:

perl -e "print+(localtime)[5]"

Quiz: can you explain why:

perl -e "print (localtime)[5]"

gives a syntax error?