CONTENTS

• NAME
• DESCRIPTION
• Who Needs Complicated Data Structures?
• The Solution
• Syntax
  • Making References
    • Make Rule 1
    • Make Rule 2
  • Using References
    • Use Rule 1
    • Use Rule 2
  • An Example
  • Arrow Rule
• Solution
• The Rest
• Summary
• Credits
  • Distribution Conditions

#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 comes up all the time is needing a hash whose values are lists. Perl has hashes, of course, but the values have to be scalars; they can'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 couldn't be lists, 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:

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