Best way to iterate through a Perl array

Question

Which is the best implementation(in terms of speed and memory usage) for iterating through a Perl array? Is there any better way? (@Array need not be retained).

Answer 1

If you only care about the elements of @Array, use:

for my $el (@Array) {
# ...
}

or

If the indices matter, use:

for my $i (0 .. $#Array) {
# ...
}

Or, as of perl 5.12.1, you can use:

while (my ($i, $el) = each @Array) {
# ...
}

If you need both the element and its index in the body of the loop, I would expect using each to be the fastest, but then you'll be giving up compatibility with pre-5.12.1 perls.

Some other pattern than these might be appropriate under certain circumstances.