foreach - Beginning Perl Tutorial, Control Structures

Next: A cleaner foreach loop

The foreach loop is a control structure that's tailor made to process Perl lists and hashes. Just like the for loop, foreach steps through each element of an array using an iterator. Rather than using a scaler as that iterator (like the for loop), foreach uses the array itself.

 @myNames = ('Larry', 'Curly', 'Moe');
 foreach (@myNames) {
 	print $_;
 } 

You'll see that this gives us the same output as printing the array @myNames in it's entirety:

 LarryCurlyMoe 

If all we wanted was to dump out the contents of our list, we could have just printed it. Lets use the foreach loop to make the output a bit more readable.

 @myNames = ('Larry', 'Curly', 'Moe');
 print "Who's on the list:\n"; foreach (@myNames) {
 	print $_ . "\n";
 } 

You'll see that this creates a cleaner output by printing a newline after each item in the list.

 Who's on the list:
 Larry
 Curly
 Moe 

Next: A cleaner foreach loop

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