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I'm looking for a one-liner that lets me grab the second return value from a subroutine.

Rather than this:

($a,$b)=function;
print $b

It should be possible to do something like this

print ??? function
Jonathan Leffler
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Steven Lu
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2 Answers2

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This works: 

sub test { return (1,2) }
print ((test)[1]);  # Returns 2

This also works:

print +(func())[1], "\n";
Ted Hopp
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    `print((function)[1])` or `print +(function)[1]` to get the precedence right. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5055519/. – mob Feb 22 '11 at 04:12
  • ah, i was missing the parens. – Steven Lu Feb 22 '11 at 04:13
  • @Steven -- yea, me too when I was playing with it. Need the parens around the [], which seems strange to me. – jr. Feb 22 '11 at 04:16
  • @jr: that's because (some of) the parens aren't just for precedence like they usually are, they are part of the `(LIST)[LIST]` list slice operator, and then you need other parens or a leading + to let perl know the list slice parens aren't just parens enclosing print's parameters. – ysth Feb 22 '11 at 04:30
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    Also possible (less efficiently) with an array slice operator: `print [function()]->[1]`. Or `print pop @{[function()]}`. – ysth Feb 22 '11 at 04:31
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assuming that function() returns a list, then using a slice like the poster above suggested works just fine. If it returns an array reference, then you need to access it appropriately, for instance (@{function()})[1] to dereference the aref and then slice it.

BadFileMagic
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