Re^3: modify list through grep

[calin]

Yes, you're right. My reply was a bit tongue-in-cheek - the OP asked why his grep aliasing example "didn't work" and I resolved to beat it into submission ;)

There's a slight difference though. *m = \@l; aliases the entire array object. The sub {\@_} trick creates a new array object containing scalar elements which are aliased to memberes in @l matching /a/ (in OP's example it contains only one element aliased to the first element in @l - "a").

[syntactic]

thanks, this would be a solution for me, unfortunately the code with sub still gives "a b c "
Extended version of the code I'm trying to get to work

foreach $p ( @patterns ) {
    if ( ??? grep /$p/, @values ) {
        modify the matching list value;
    } else {
        push @values, "strings $pattern";
    }
}

For the modification part I can use grep again and modify the value through $_, but then I call expensive grep twice. If I could save a reference (alias?) into @values in the if condition statement I can have a lighter code.

[tye]

for my $p (  @patterns  ) {
    my $found= 0;
    for my $last (  ( grep /$p/, @values )[-1]  ) {
        $last .= '.'; # whatever mod you want
        $found= 1;
    }
    push @values, "string $p"
        if  ! $found;
}