Iterating Over an Array by Reference

Problem

You have a reference to an array, and you want to use foreach to work with the array's elements.

Solution

Use foreach or for to loop over the dereferenced array:

# iterate over elements of array in $ARRAYREF foreach $item (@$ARRAYREF) {
 # do something with $item
}
for ($i = 0; $i <= $#$ARRAYREF; $i++) {
 # do something with $ARRAYREF->[$i] }

Discussion

The solutions assume you have a scalar variable containing the array reference. This lets you do things like this:

@fruits = ( "Apple", "Blackberry" ); $fruit_ref = \@fruits; foreach $fruit (@$fruit_ref) {
 print "$fruit tastes good in a pie.\n";
}
Apple tastes good in a pie. Blackberry tastes good in a pie.

We could have rewritten the foreach loop as a for loop like this:

for ($i=0; $i <= $#$fruit_ref; $i++) {
 print "$fruit_ref->[$i] tastes good in a pie.\n";
}

Frequently, though, the array reference is the result of a more complex expression. You need to use the @{ EXPR } notation to turn the result of the expression back into an array:

$namelist{felines} = \@rogue_cats; foreach $cat ( @{ $namelist{felines}
}
) {
 print "$cat purrs hypnotically..\n";
}
print "--More--\nYou are controlled.\n";

Again, we can replace the foreach with a for loop:

for ($i=0; $i <= $#{ $namelist{felines} };
 $i++) {
 print "$namelist{felines}[$i] purrs hypnotically.\n";
}