Neozilon Technology Blog

Use operator $# in Perl

In the last few weeks I have been developing a lot of scripts in Perl, I’m not a fan of this scripting language but is very useful in some cases, but I had some troubles with arrays and list in Perl , and today I saw a mistake in my code, and that was how I was using the operator $#.

The $# operator will get the index value of last element in a specific array, and It will not return the length of the array this was my mistake , that’s what happend when you don’t read the documentation :-s.

A simple example how to use this operator.

@names = ("popov", "phelps", "thorpe","smith");
$value = $#names;   ## $i is now 3

And to find out the length of an array use the function scalar

@names = ("popov", "phelps", "thorpe","smith");
$value = scalar(@names);   ## $i is now 4

I will write more perl post , and some troubles I had in the last few days.