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From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: what should length(@array) do ?
Message-ID: <1991Jan10.025554.16925@convex.com>
Date: 10 Jan 91 02:55:54 GMT
References: <EMV.91Jan9211727@crane.aa.ox.com>
Sender: news@convex.com (news access account)
Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX
Lines: 38
Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com

From the keyboard of emv@ox.com (Ed Vielmetti):

:I had some code that looked like
:body: {
:    @obody = <STDIN>;
:}
:which seemed to work just fine and quick too.  Now I want to find out
:how many bytes are in this array.  The obvious (?) solution to me was
:    $obodylen = length(@obody);
:but that gets me "3", probably the size of some symbol table entry.

Remembering that @foo in a scalar context yields the number of elements,
I'll bet you that you read in between 100 and 999 elements in the array.

:The solution I now have does
:body: while (<STDIN>) {
:    push(@obody,$_) ;
:    $obodylen += length($_);
:}

:seems to work fine, but in the tradition of perl hacking, there's
:probably a better way.

A better way?  No, but in the tradition of perl hacking there are a googol
of *other* ways. :-)  The way you have there looks pretty good, since
you've got each line to grab the length of as you're going.

If I had to write an array length function the way you've described it,
I'd probably use something like:

    sub alen {  # usage: $n = &alen(*ary); where @ary exists
	local(*a) = @_; 
	local($len,$_);
	grep($len += length, @a);
	$len;
    } 

--tom