Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, Second Edition

Going Deeper

We've covered a lot in this lesson, but there's still more about arrays and hashes I haven't discussed (really!). This section summarizes some of the features of lists, arrays, and hashes that I haven't covered in the body of this lesson. Feel free to explore these parts of Perl on your own.

Negative Array Indexes

In the array access expression $array[index], usually the index will be the position of the element in the array, starting from 0. You can also use negative array subscripts, like this:

$array[-1];

Negative array subscripts will count back from the end of the array—so an index of -1 refers to the last index in the array (same as $#array), -2 refers to the second to last index, and so on. You can also assign to those positions, ...