Anonymous Arrays

• anonymous array
• []

Occasionally we are not interested in the array @names, just in a reference to it. We can use the scoping trick we saw earlier to force the array out of scope immediately once it was used.

my $names_ref;
{
    my @names     = ("Foo", "Bar", "Baz");
    $names_ref = \@names;
}
# @names is not in scope here
# $names_ref is still is

We can reach the same result without the temporary array and the whole scoping issue by creating what we call an "anonymous array". That is an array that does not have a real name, (@name) just a reference to it.

my $other_names_ref = ["Foo", "Bar", "Baz"];

my $yet_another_names_ref = [ qw(Foo Bar Baz) ];

We got used to seeing [] as an indicator of an array element. The same visual clue will help us remember that the above creates an array reference.