Best way to iterate through a Perl array

If you only care about the elements of @Array, use:

for my $el (@Array) {
# ...
}

or

If the indices matter, use:

for my $i (0 .. $#Array) {
# ...
}

Or, as of perl 5.12.1, you can use:

while (my ($i, $el) = each @Array) {
# ...
}

If you need both the element and its index in the body of the loop, I would expect using each to be the fastest, but then you'll be giving up compatibility with pre-5.12.1 perls.

Some other pattern than these might be appropriate under certain circumstances.

The best way to decide questions like this to benchmark them:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark qw(:all);

our @input_array = (0..1000);

my $a = sub {
    my @array = @{[ @input_array ]};
    my $index = 0;
    foreach my $element (@array) {
       die unless $index == $element;
       $index++;
    }
};

my $b = sub {
    my @array = @{[ @input_array ]};
    my $index = 0;
    while (defined(my $element = shift @array)) {
       die unless $index == $element;
       $index++;
    }
};

my $c = sub {
    my @array = @{[ @input_array ]};
    my $index = 0;
    while (scalar(@array) !=0) {
       my $element = shift(@array);
       die unless $index == $element;
       $index++;
    }
};

my $d = sub {
    my @array = @{[ @input_array ]};
    foreach my $index (0.. $#array) {
       my $element = $array[$index];
       die unless $index == $element;
    }
};

my $e = sub {
    my @array = @{[ @input_array ]};
    for (my $index = 0; $index <= $#array; $index++) {
       my $element = $array[$index];
       die unless $index == $element;
    }
};

my $f = sub {
    my @array = @{[ @input_array ]};
    while (my ($index, $element) = each @array) {
       die unless $index == $element;
    }
};

my $count;
timethese($count, {
   '1' => $a,
   '2' => $b,
   '3' => $c,
   '4' => $d,
   '5' => $e,
   '6' => $f,
});

And running this on perl 5, version 24, subversion 1 (v5.24.1) built for x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi

I get:

Benchmark: running 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 for at least 3 CPU seconds...
         1:  3 wallclock secs ( 3.16 usr +  0.00 sys =  3.16 CPU) @ 12560.13/s (n=39690)
         2:  3 wallclock secs ( 3.18 usr +  0.00 sys =  3.18 CPU) @ 7828.30/s (n=24894)
         3:  3 wallclock secs ( 3.23 usr +  0.00 sys =  3.23 CPU) @ 6763.47/s (n=21846)
         4:  4 wallclock secs ( 3.15 usr +  0.00 sys =  3.15 CPU) @ 9596.83/s (n=30230)
         5:  4 wallclock secs ( 3.20 usr +  0.00 sys =  3.20 CPU) @ 6826.88/s (n=21846)
         6:  3 wallclock secs ( 3.12 usr +  0.00 sys =  3.12 CPU) @ 5653.53/s (n=17639)

So the 'foreach (@Array)' is about twice as fast as the others. All the others are very similar.

@ikegami also points out that there are quite a few differences in these implimentations other than speed.

IMO, implementation #1 is typical and being short and idiomatic for Perl trumps the others for that alone. A benchmark of the three choices might offer you insight into speed, at least.

• In terms of speed: #1 and #4, but not by much in most instances.

  You could write a benchmark to confirm, but I suspect you'll find #1 and #4 to be slightly faster because the iteration work is done in C instead of Perl, and no needless copying of the array elements occurs. ($_ is aliased to the element in #1, but #2 and #3 actually copy the scalars from the array.)

  #5 might be similar.

• In terms memory usage: They're all the same except for #5.

  for (@a) is special-cased to avoid flattening the array. The loop iterates over the indexes of the array.

• In terms of readability: #1.

• In terms of flexibility: #1/#4 and #5.

  #2 does not support elements that are false. #2 and #3 are destructive.