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    Ongoing observations by End Point Dev people

    Insidious List Context

    Jeff Boes

    By Jeff Boes
    September 20, 2012

    Recently, I fell into a deep pit. Not literally, but a deep pit of Perl debugging. As a result, I’m here to warn you and yours about “Insidious List Context(TM)”.

    (Note: this is a fairly elementary discussion, for people early in their Perl wizardry training.)

    Perl has two contexts for evaluating expressions: list and scalar. (All who know this stuff cold can skip down a ways.) “Scalar” context is what non-Perl languages just call “normal reality”, but Perl likes to do things … differently … so we have more than one context.

    In scalar context, a scalar is a scalar is a scalar, but a list becomes a scalar that represents the number of items in the list. Thus,

    @x = (1, 1, 1);  # @x is a list of three 1s
    # vs.
    $x = (1, 1, 1);  # $x is "3", the list size
    

    In list context, a list of things is still a list of things. That’s pretty simple, but when you are expecting a scalar and you get a list, your world can get pretty confused.

    Okay, now the know-it-alls have rejoined us. I had a Perl hashref being initialized with code something like this:

    my $hr = {
      KEY1 => $value1,
      KEY2 => $value2,
      KEY_TROUBLE => (defined($foo) ? mysub($foo) : 1),
      KEY3 => $value3,
    };
    

    So here is the issue: if mysub() returns a list, then the hashref will get extra data. Remember, Perl n00bs, “=>” is not a magical operator, it’s just a “fat comma”. So a construction like this:

    1 => (2, 3, 4)
    

    is really the same as:

    1, 2, 3, 4
    

    Here’s a complete example to illustrate just what size and shape hole I fell into:

    use strict;
    use Data::Dumper;
    
    my($value1,$value2,$value3,$foo) = qw(value1 value2 value3 foo);
    
    my $hr = {
      KEY1 => $value1,
      KEY2 => $value2,
      KEY_TROUBLE => (defined($foo) ? mysub($foo) : 1),
      KEY3 => $value3,
    };
    
    print Data::Dumper->Dumper($hr);
    
    sub mysub {
      return qw(junk extrajunk);
    }
    

    This outputs:

    $VAR1 = 'Data::Dumper';
    $VAR2 = {
              'extrajunk' => 'KEY3',
              'KEY2' => 'value2',
              'KEY1' => 'value1',
              'value3' => undef,
              'KEY_TROUBLE' => 'junk'
            };
    

    Now, the actual subroutine involved in my little adventure was even more insidious: it returned a list context because it was evaluating a regular expression, in a list context. Its actual source:

    sub is_yes {
       return( defined($_[0]) && ($_[0] =~ /^[yYtT1]/));
    }
    

    So watch those expression-evaluation contexts; they can turn fairly harmless expressions into code-busters.

    interchange perl


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