Re^8: How to combine these 2 subroutines in one?

[Athanasius]

Correct!

That is, provided that the passed-in-array does not itself contain references. For the purpose of this exercise, you may know that it won’t, but in the general case, it might, which is why a solution using wantarray may be preferable here, as explained above.

Note that “empty” here means the empty string, i.e. "", so to make the test more robust you could write:

my $type_of_arg = ref $_[0];

if ($type_of_arg eq "ARRAY")
{
    # Handle an array reference
}
elsif ($type_of_arg eq "")
{
    # Handle an array
}
else
{
    die "Unexpected reference type '$type_of_arg': $!";
}

Hope that helps,

[Anonymous Monk]

Thank you so much for these tips, references have always been a headache to me... Actually, I don't quite understand what do we use them for, I need to study up on this more!