Re: Strange Global Array issue

[hdb]

Have you tried to remove the reliance on $_ in your sub?

while (my $line = <DKT>){
# my $line =$_;
# process data in here
}

[Anonymous Monk]

First of all, that did the trick. Thanks!

Second (and more importantly for my understanding of Perl), would you mind explaining why that would be the fix?

[hdb]

There is only one $_ in your program and you did use it for two different purposes. One has to be careful sometimes with Perl's build-in variables.

From "Modern Perl", page 7: http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/modern_perl_a4.pdf

As English gets confusing when you have too many pronouns and antecedents, you must take care mixing uses of $_ implicitly or explicitly. Uncautious simultaneous use of $_ may lead to one piece of code silently overwriting the value written by another. If you write a function which uses $_, you may clobber a caller function's use of $_.

UPDATE: In order to make your script more robust overall, you might also want to remove $_ from your outer loop.

foreach my $regex (@regexes){
    ($fileBodyMatch, $decode ) = checkFileBody ($file, $regex->{bodyre
+gex});
}

[topher]

The use of $_ in a foreach doesn't add much risk or cause much reduction in the robustness of the code. foreach, like map and grep, will always localize $_ within its scope.

There is only the slight risk of the function mucking with $_ (as the original poster's original function did); however, any function that uses or modifies a non-localized $_ is broken.