Perl: array reference versus anonymous array

Question

This may be a silly question... The following code outputs the contents of @arrayref and @arraycont respectively. Note the difference between them

Answer 1

You made stored references to a single array in both $arrayref[0] and $arrayref[1]. You should have used different arrays.

my @refs;

my @array1 = qw(1 2 3 4);
push @refs, \@array1;

my @array2 = qw(5 6 7 8);
push @refs, \@array2;

In practice, my is executed in each pass of a loop, creating a new array each time.

my @refs;
while ( my @row = get() ) {
   push @refs, \@row;
}

In rare occasions where you have to clone an array, you can use:

use Storable qw( dclone );

push @refs, [ @row ];       # Shallow clone
push @refs, dclone(\@row);  # Deep clone