Deleting and replacing list elements with the splice function

Advanced list array manipulation with the push, pop, shift, and unshift functions

• Of course, once we have created a list array, we can do much more than just access the elements. We can also manipulate the elements in many ways. In CGI, list arrays are most often manipulated using the operators push, pop, shift and unshift.

• Push is used to add a new element on the right hand side of a list array. Thus, the following code would create a list array of ("red", "green", "blue")

  @colors = ("red", "green"); 
  push (@colors, "blue"); 
  

• In other words, the push operator, adds an element to the end of an existing list.

• Pop does the exact same thing as push, but in reverse. Pop extracts the right side element of a list array using the following syntax:

  $popped_value = pop (@array_name); 
  

• Thus, we might pop out the value blue from @colors with the following syntax:

  $last_color_in_list = pop (@colors); 
  

• Thus, the @colors array now contains only "red" and "green" and the variable $last_color_in_list is equal to "blue".

• Unshift does the exact same thing as push, but it performs the addition to the left side of the list array instead of to the right. Thus, we would create the list ("blue", "red", "green") with the following syntax:

  @colors = ("red", "green"); 
  unshift (@colors, "blue"); 
  

• Similarly, shift works the same as pop, but to the left side of the list array. Thus, we reduce @colors to just "red" and "green" by shifting the first element blue with the following syntax:

  $first_color_in_list = shift(@colors); 
  

• Thus, @colors again contains only "red" and "green" and $first_color_in_list equals blue.

• Though push, pop, shift, and unshift are the most common list array manipulation functions used, there are many others covered in more complete references. The following table summarizes some of the common array manipulating operators.

Additional Resources:

• CGI: The Common Gateway Interface for Server-side Processing

Deleting and replacing list elements with the splice function
Table of Contents
Perl Associative Arrays