How do I determine the number of elements in an array reference?

Question

Here is the situation I am facing...

$perl_scalar = decode_json( encode (\'utf8\',$line));

decode_json returns a reference. I am sure this is a

Answer 1

That would be:

scalar(@{$perl_scalar});

You can get more information from perlreftut.

You can copy your referenced array to a normal one like this:

my @array = @{$perl_scalar};

But before that you should check whether the $perl_scalar is really referencing an array, with ref:

if (ref($perl_scalar) eq "ARRAY") {
  my @array = @{$perl_scalar};
  # ...
}

Update

The length method cannot be used to calculate length of arrays, it's for getting the length of the strings.