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From: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal L. Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: what should length(@array) do ?
Message-ID: <1991Jan10.063409.7185@iwarp.intel.com>
Date: 10 Jan 91 06:34:09 GMT
References: <EMV.91Jan9211727@crane.aa.ox.com>
Sender: news@iwarp.intel.com
Reply-To: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal L. Schwartz)
Organization: Stonehenge; netaccess via Intel, Beaverton, Oregon, USA
Lines: 54
In-Reply-To: emv@ox.com (Ed Vielmetti)

In article <EMV.91Jan9211727@crane.aa.ox.com>, emv@ox (Ed Vielmetti) writes:
|     $obodylen = length(@obody);
| but that gets me "3", probably the size of some symbol table entry.

My wild guess is that @obody has between 100 and 999 entries in it,
and you are looking at the length of the number of entries as
converted to a string!  Am I right?

| 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.

If you don't like that, but you don't mind concat-ing the whole mess
once just to throw it away, try:

body: {
	@obody = <STDIN>;
	$obodylen = length(join("",@obody));
}

If you think that obody is huge, try something like:

body: {
	@obody = <STDIN>;
	$obodylen = 0;
	for (@obody) {
		$obodylen += length;
	}
}

Yeah, actually, that's close to your solution.  You could also do it
with a grep() (my formerly favorite operator, until I got tired of it
:-) as in:

body: {
	@obody = <STDIN>;
	$obodylen = 0;
	grep($obodylen += length, @obody);
}

which probably isn't any faster than the previous code.  (Larry?)

print join("", "Just a", "nother P", "erl ha", "cker,")
-- 
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III      |
| merlyn@iwarp.intel.com ...!any-MX-mailer-like-uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn |
\=Cute Quote: "Intel: putting the 'backward' in 'backward compatible'..."====/