What does it mean when you try to print an array or hash using Perl and you get, Array(0xd3888)?

Question

What does it mean when you try to print an array or hash and you see the following; Array(0xd3888) or HASH(0xd3978)?

EXAMPLE

CODE

my @data =          


        

Answer 1

It means you do not have an array; you have a reference to an array.

Note that an array is specified with round brackets - as a list; when you use the square bracket notation, you are creating a reference to an array.

foreach my $line (@data)
{
    my @array = @$line;
    print "$array[0] - $array[1] - $array[2]\n";
}

---

Illustrating the difference:

my @data = (
['1_TEST','1_T','1_TESTER'],
['2_TEST','2_T','2_TESTER'],
['3_TEST','3_T','3_TESTER'],
['4_TEST','4_T','4_TESTER'],
['5_TEST','5_T','5_TESTER'],
['6_TEST','6_T','^_TESTER']
);

# Original print loop
foreach my $line (@data)
{
    chomp($line);
    @random = split(/\|/,$line);
    print "".$random[0]."".$random[1]."".$random[2]."","\n";
}

# Revised print loop
foreach my $line (@data)
{
    my @array = @$line;
    print "$array[0] - $array[1] - $array[2]\n";
}

Output

ARRAY(0x62c0f8)
ARRAY(0x649db8)
ARRAY(0x649980)
ARRAY(0x649e48)
ARRAY(0x649ec0)
ARRAY(0x649f38)
1_TEST - 1_T - 1_TESTER
2_TEST - 2_T - 2_TESTER
3_TEST - 3_T - 3_TESTER
4_TEST - 4_T - 4_TESTER
5_TEST - 5_T - 5_TESTER
6_TEST - 6_T - ^_TESTER