Re: Improving if statements

[biohisham]

Multiple if statements are really redundant, that is true, but not necessarily a bad thing unless readability of the code becomes difficult. I find the solutions by Your Mother and choroba to be very educational, succinct and efficient. It may be also relevant to include the utility of the Switch module for tasks like testing different cases and responsing to each case.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Switch;


my $item = $ARGV[0];
switch($item){
    case "moo" {print "cow"}
    case "test" {print "blue"}
    case "dark" {print "black"}
    case "white" {print "light"}
    case "house" {print "home"}
    case "all things" {print "multi"}
    case "money" {print "value"}
    case "country" {print "Well, not Scotland apparently"}
    else {print "NAOAOAOANOOOO!!!" }
    }

UPDATE: The use of switch statements in the way I recommended may not be a favorable option judging by the amount of downvotes my reply received. Thanks Tobylink for elaborating on problems with Switch statements, I definitely learned something new about them.

[tobyink]

Don't recommend Switch please. The abstract in its documentation says (my emphasis):

A switch statement for Perl, do not use if you can use given/when

It continues:

There are undoubtedly serious bugs lurking somewhere in code this funky :-) Bug reports and other feedback are most welcome.

May create syntax errors in other parts of code.

On perl 5.10.x may cause syntax error if "case" is present inside heredoc.

In general, use given/when instead. It were introduced in perl 5.10.0. Perl 5.10.0 was released in 2007.

The given and when keywords were introduced in Perl 5.10. They are experimental, and will warn on some versions of Perl (unless you disable that warning), but still a lot more reliable than Switch.

There's also Switch::Plain and Switcheroo on CPAN.