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CONTENTS

NAME

perlreftut - Mark's very short tutorial about references

DESCRIPTION

One of the most important new features in Perl 5 was the capability to manage complicated data structures like multidimensional arrays and nested hashes. To enable these, Perl 5 introduced a feature called `references', and using references is the key to managing complicated, structured data in Perl. Unfortunately, there's a lot of funny syntax to learn, and the main manual page can be hard to follow. The manual is quite complete, and sometimes people find that a problem, because it can be hard to tell what is important and what isn't.

Fortunately, you only need to know 10% of what's in the main page to get 90% of the benefit. This page will show you that 10%.

Who Needs Complicated Data Structures?

One problem that came up all the time in Perl 4 was how to represent a hash whose values were lists. Perl 4 had hashes, of course, but the values had to be scalars; they couldn't be lists.

Why would you want a hash of lists? Let's take a simple example: You have a file of city and country names, like this:

Chicago, USA
Frankfurt, Germany
Berlin, Germany
Washington, USA
Helsinki, Finland
New York, USA

and you want to produce an output like this, with each country mentioned once, and then an alphabetical list of the cities in that country:

Finland: Helsinki.
Germany: Berlin, Frankfurt.
USA:  Chicago, New York, Washington.

The natural way to do this is to have a hash whose keys are country names. Associated with each country name key is a list of the cities in that country. Each time you read a line of input, split it into a country and a city, look up the list of cities already known to be in that country, and append the new city to the list. When you're done reading the input, iterate over the hash as usual, sorting each list of cities before you print it out.

If hash values can't be lists, you lose. In Perl 4, hash values can't be lists; they can only be strings. You lose. You'd probably have to combine all the cities into a single string somehow, and then when time came to write the output, you'd have to break the string into a list, sort the list, and turn it back into a string. This is messy and error-prone. And it's frustrating, because Perl already has perfectly good lists that would solve the problem if only you could use them.

The Solution

By the time Perl 5 rolled around, we were already stuck with this design: Hash values must be scalars. The solution to this is references.

A reference is a scalar value that refers to an entire array or an entire hash (or to just about anything else). Names are one kind of reference that you're already familiar with. Think of the President of the United States: a messy, inconvenient bag of blood and bones. But to talk about him, or to represent him in a computer program, all you need is the easy, convenient scalar string "Barack Obama".

References in Perl are like names for arrays and hashes. They're Perl's private, internal names, so you can be sure they're unambiguous. Unlike "Barack Obama", a reference only refers to one thing, and you always know what it refers to. If you have a reference to an array, you can recover the entire array from it. If you have a reference to a hash, you can recover the entire hash. But the reference is still an easy, compact scalar value.

You can't have a hash whose values are arrays; hash values can only be scalars. We're stuck with that. But a single reference can refer to an entire array, and references are scalars, so you can have a hash of references to arrays, and it'll act a lot like a hash of arrays, and it'll be just as useful as a hash of arrays.

We'll come back to this city-country problem later, after we've seen some syntax for managing references.

Syntax

There are just two ways to make a reference, and just two ways to use it once you have it.

Making References

Make Rule 1

If you put a \ in front of a variable, you get a reference to that variable.

$aref = \@array;         # $aref now holds a reference to @array
$href = \%hash;          # $href now holds a reference to %hash
$sref = \$scalar;        # $sref now holds a reference to $scalar

Once the reference is stored in a variable like $aref or $href, you can copy it or store it just the same as any other scalar value:

$xy = $aref;             # $xy now holds a reference to @array
$p[3] = $href;           # $p[3] now holds a reference to %hash
$z = $p[3];              # $z now holds a reference to %hash

These examples show how to make references to variables with names. Sometimes you want to make an array or a hash that doesn't have a name. This is analogous to the way you like to be able to use the string "\n" or the number 80 without having to store it in a named variable first.

Make Rule 2

[ ITEMS ] makes a new, anonymous array, and returns a reference to that array. { ITEMS } makes a new, anonymous hash, and returns a reference to that hash.

$aref = [ 1, "foo", undef, 13 ];
# $aref now holds a reference to an array

$href = { APR => 4, AUG => 8 };
# $href now holds a reference to a hash

The references you get from rule 2 are the same kind of references that you get from rule 1:

# This:
$aref = [ 1, 2, 3 ];

# Does the same as this:
@array = (1, 2, 3);
$aref = \@array;

The first line is an abbreviation for the following two lines, except that it doesn't create the superfluous array variable @array.

If you write just [], you get a new, empty anonymous array. If you write just {}, you get a new, empty anonymous hash.

Using References

What can you do with a reference once you have it? It's a scalar value, and we've seen that you can store it as a scalar and get it back again just like any scalar. There are just two more ways to use it:

Use Rule 1

You can always use an array reference, in curly braces, in place of the name of an array. For example, @{$aref} instead of @array.

Here are some examples of that:

Arrays:

@a		@{$aref}		An array
reverse @a	reverse @{$aref}	Reverse the array
$a[3]		${$aref}[3]		An element of the array
$a[3] = 17;	${$aref}[3] = 17	Assigning an element

On each line are two expressions that do the same thing. The left-hand versions operate on the array @a. The right-hand versions operate on the array that is referred to by $aref. Once they find the array they're operating on, both versions do the same things to the arrays.

Using a hash reference is exactly the same:

%h		%{$href}	      A hash
keys %h		keys %{$href}	      Get the keys from the hash
$h{'red'}	${$href}{'red'}	      An element of the hash
$h{'red'} = 17	${$href}{'red'} = 17  Assigning an element

Whatever you want to do with a reference, Use Rule 1 tells you how to do it. You just write the Perl code that you would have written for doing the same thing to a regular array or hash, and then replace the array or hash name with {$reference}. "How do I loop over an array when all I have is a reference?" Well, to loop over an array, you would write

for my $element (@array) {
   ...
}

so replace the array name, @array, with the reference:

for my $element (@{$aref}) {
   ...
}

"How do I print out the contents of a hash when all I have is a reference?" First write the code for printing out a hash:

for my $key (keys %hash) {
  print "$key => $hash{$key}\n";
}

And then replace the hash name with the reference:

for my $key (keys %{$href}) {
  print "$key => ${$href}{$key}\n";
}

Use Rule 2

Use Rule 1 is all you really need, because it tells you how to do absolutely everything you ever need to do with references. But the most common thing to do with an array or a hash is to extract a single element, and the Use Rule 1 notation is cumbersome. So there is an abbreviation.

${$aref}[3] is too hard to read, so you can write $aref->[3] instead.

${$href}{red} is too hard to read, so you can write $href->{red} instead.

If $aref holds a reference to an array, then $aref->[3] is the fourth element of the array. Don't confuse this with $aref[3], which is the fourth element of a totally different array, one deceptively named @aref. $aref and @aref are unrelated the same way that $item and @item are.

Similarly, $href->{'red'} is part of the hash referred to by the scalar variable $href, perhaps even one with no name. $href{'red'} is part of the deceptively named %href hash. It's easy to forget to leave out the ->, and if you do, you'll get bizarre results when your program gets array and hash elements out of totally unexpected hashes and arrays that weren't the ones you wanted to use.

An Example

Let's see a quick example of how all this is useful.

First, remember that [1, 2, 3] makes an anonymous array containing (1, 2, 3), and gives you a reference to that array.

Now think about

	@a = ( [1, 2, 3],
               [4, 5, 6],
	       [7, 8, 9]
             );

@a is an array with three elements, and each one is a reference to another array.

$a[1] is one of these references. It refers to an array, the array containing (4, 5, 6), and because it is a reference to an array, Use Rule 2 says that we can write $a[1]->[2] to get the third element from that array. $a[1]->[2] is the 6. Similarly, $a[0]->[1] is the 2. What we have here is like a two-dimensional array; you can write $a[ROW]->[COLUMN] to get or set the element in any row and any column of the array.

The notation still looks a little cumbersome, so there's one more abbreviation: