Position of string within array? 3

[domster]

Hi, I can't find a function that will return the position of a string within an array. For example, if the array is:

[aardvark, abacus, abandon, abate, abattoir...]

I want to search it for 'abate' and return position 3. What I want to do is search an alphabetically-sorted list and see which words are next in the list to the search word.

I can't believe there isn't an obvious way of doing this, though maybe my brain just isn't working today. Thanks for your help.

Dom

 

[peterneve]

The following short program should do what you want

#!c:/Perl/bin/Perl.exe
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

@list=("Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday");
$look_for="Wednesday";

for ($i=0; $i<$#list; $i++) {
    if ($list[$i] eq $look_for) { last; }
}

print "The word $look_for is item number $i in the list";

It's a bit messy but works.

 

[domster]

Thanks - I thought of that, but the list is going to be very long - it's the contents of a dictionary, basically. This seems very inefficient to me, surely there's a better way?

 

[toolkit]

Another way:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
@dict = qw[aardvark abacus abandon abate abattoir];
@hash{@dict} = (1..scalar(@dict));
$lookfor = "abattoir";
print "$lookfor is in position $hash{$lookfor}\n";

Cheers, Neil

 

[nix45]

thanks toolkit, I was wondering the same thing. One thing though, shouldn't it be "0..scalar(@dict)" instead of 1 since array element numbering starts at 0?

 

[toolkit]

If you want your position to be zero based, instead of 1-based, then I think (I'm at home, so I can't test these) the code should be:

@hash{@dict} = (0..$#dict);

Cheers, Neil

 

[nix45]

toolkit, your original code works perfectly just replacing the 1 with a 0.