There are still a couple of loose ones in there. -2 or -3 if you count the superfluous ;

($£=pop)=~/1./?0:qw(0 st nd rd)[$£%10]or'th'
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My best alternate ain't even close, substr is too long.

sub nthit{
substr'thstndrd',($£=pop)=~/1./||($£%=10)>3?0:2*$£,2
}
[download]

What's with the accent marks and sterling pounds? I read that as a variable name, but why use two chars for an arbitrary name? Must be something special, or something else that got displayed wrong.

In essence, any single char scalar name would do.

I started using $£ as a variable name in golf-type solutions as its the only punctuation global that isn't used for something somewhere by Perl itself, therefore it doesn't cause warnings with strict, and I don't have to localise it.

Quite why one instance of the £ character got converted during the process of posting the code, and none of the others did I am not quite sure. I even tried to correct it by cut&pasting one of the others that shows correctly (in my browser at least) over the top of the one that comes out wrong, but the results where always the same. I have no idea how to correct it.




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Nah! Your thinking of Simon Templar, originally played by Roger Moore and later by Ian Ogilvy

shift;/1\d/?0:qw(0 st nd rd)[$_%10]or'th'
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.02

cLive ;-)

If you can live with the risk of the sub stomping on the callers copy of $_ by not localising it, then you could trim a couple more keystrokes by using pop instead of shift, and you also can trim the regex by another 1

pop;/1./?0:qw(0 st nd rd)[$_%10]or'th'
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Nah! Your thinking of Simon Templar, originally played by Roger Moore and later by Ian Ogilvy

Is this what you want? (Neither pop nor shift load $_ by defalult -- they just default to using @_ in a sub or @ARGV in the main prog.)

$_=pop;qw(0 st nd rd)[!/1./&&$_%10]or'th'
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  p

pop=~/1?./;qw(0 st nd rd)[$&]or'th'
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small improvement:

(0,st,nd,rd)[pop=~/1?./g]||th

Wow, didn't know about dropping the qw!
Why does the ||th  lead to only returning the last value from the /1?./g -indexed list?

Update:  I see, it becomes a comma list which returns the last value ("the result of the last expression").
see, A list returns its last, an array returns its weight

  p