http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=476062

mrd has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear monks,

I'm looking for a shortcut to extract a specific element out of an array without using a temporary variable. The array is returned by a function and I only need a particular element of that.

Since a line of code is worth 2000 lines of plain (gibberish) text (of mine), here is what I do:

@tmp = function($param); $elem = $tmp[5]
Only I want to do it shorter. Something like:
$elem = (function($param))[5]
which obviously doesn't work.

Thanks,

mrd

PS: I could wrap function() in another function that returns the element I want from a local array. But that's just too much work :)

PPS: I'm sure it's been discussed before but I can't seem to come up with an adequate search expression.