Perl Cd Bookshelf [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

10.9.1. Problem

Return references to the hashes or arrays:

($array_ref, $hash_ref) = somefunc( );
sub somefunc {
my @array;
my %hash;
# ...
return ( \@array, \%hash );
}

Just as all arguments collapse into one flat list of scalars, return
values do, too. Functions that want to return multiple, distinct
arrays or hashes need to return those by reference, and the caller
must be prepared to receive references. If a function wants to return
three separate hashes, for example, it should use one of the
following:

sub fn {
.....
return (\%a, \%b, \%c); # or
return \(%a, %b, %c); # same thing
}

The caller must expect a list of hash references returned by the
function. It cannot just assign to three hashes.

(%h0, %h1, %h2) = fn( ); # WRONG!
@array_of_hashes = fn( ); # eg: $array_of_hashes[2]{"keystring"}
($r0, $r1, $r2) = fn( ); # eg: $r2->{"keystring"}