In Perl, you can store a number or a string (or a reference or a regular expression) in a scalar variable, and you can store a collection of such scalars in a list.

Scalar variables are written starting with a $, and list variable names starting with an @. You can perform operations on a list as a whole using standard operators - known as "list context". If you do something that really isn't sensible on a list, then Perl will do it in scalar context instead, where it takes the length of the list and uses that.

If you write a list within double quotes, that's in effect a third context - "double quote context" - and it expands the list with a space between each element.

Here's an example:


Here's what you'll see if you run that:



See also Perl Lists

Please note that articles in this section of our web site were current and correct to the best of our ability when published, but by the nature of our business may go out of date quite quickly. The quoting of a price, contract term or any other information in this area of our website is NOT an offer to supply now on those terms - please check back via our main web site

Perl - Lists
resource index - Perl
Solutions centre home page

You'll find shorter technical items at The Horse's Mouth and delegate's questions answered at the Opentalk forum.

At Well House Consultants, we provide training courses on subjects such as Ruby, Perl, Python, Linux, C, C++, Tcl/Tk, Tomcat, PHP and MySQL. We're asked (and answer) many questions, and answers to those which are of general interest are published in this area of our site.