How do I make a subroutine that accepts an array or a variable number of scalars?

Question

I'm looking to make a subroutine mysub which should behave such that the following two calls are effectively the same.

mysub(["values", "in", "a", "list"]);
mysub("Passing", "scalar", "values");

What is the proper syntax to make this happen?

Perl's system function doesn't handle array reference arguments very well (unless you have a program called ARRAY(0xa63af0) in your path). — mob
– mob, Commented Mar 11, 2011 at 21:31
Hmmm... This is still what I want. I'm not sure what made be think this is how system works. Thanks, I'll edit my question. — ajwood
– ajwood, Commented Mar 12, 2011 at 20:34

toolic · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-11 21:02:41Z

18

Check if @_ contains a single array reference.

sub mysub {
    if ( @_ == 1 && ref( $_[0] ) eq 'ARRAY' ) {
        # Single array ref
    } else {
        # A list
    }
}

The if clause checks that only one argument was passed and that the argument is an array reference using ref. To make sure that the cases are the same:

sub mysub {
    if ( @_ == 1 && ref( $_[0] ) eq 'ARRAY' ) {
        @_ = @{ $_[0] };
    }
    # Rest of the code
}

edited Mar 11, 2011 at 21:02

toolic

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answered Mar 11, 2011 at 20:37

Tim

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