Array Splicing: Need Help!

[Alberta226]

Hiya PerlMonks! I have this code:

#!/usr/bin/perl


use warnings;
use strict;


#############################################################
# Array splicing
# Removing elements then returning more than one element at a time
#############################################################


my @colors = ("red", "blue", "orange", "purple", "pink", "white");

splice(@colors, 0, 2);

print @colors;

It is suppose to remove the first three sets of information from the list leaving purple, pink and white. Instead I get oranglepurplepinkwhite Any ideas?

[Hena]

The third argument is lenght (not last to be removed as I assume you are thinking). As you set lenght into 2, so it removes two elements.

[reasonablekeith]

as can easily be discovered by typing

perldoc -f splice

  splice ARRAY,OFFSET,LENGTH
    Removes the elements designated by OFFSET and LENGTH from an
    array, and replaces them with the elements of LIST, if any.

[monkfan]

Or try "array slice"

$ perl -e '
my @colors = qw(red blue orange purple pink white);
@colors = @colors[3..$#colors]; 
print join (" ", @colors),"\n";'

prints:

purple pink white

Update: Check perldata for more detail explanation about slice.

[Anonymous Monk]

Cool! Does that mean we can always replace "splice" with "slicing"?
Is there any case where only "splice" works but not slicing?

[chromatic]

Splicing modifies the array. Slicing returns a list without modifying the original data structure (whether it's a hash, an array, or a list).

[rupesh]

C:\>perl
my @colors = ("red", "blue", "orange", "purple", "pink", "white");
splice(@colors, 0, 3);
print "@colors";
^D
purple pink white
C:\>