Yesterday, we went through array variables, and there was much rejoicing. We saw how to add and remove things at the ends. We learned how to treat arrays as a single item. We learned how to inspect and change individual array elements.

But there's something missing still. Something important. We will often want a way to say, "for every element in this array, do this...".

We need a kind of loop for arrays.

my @seasons = "winter", "spring", "summer", "fall";

for @seasons {
    say "Yay, $_!";
}

# Yay, winter!
# Yay, spring!
# Yay, summer!
# Yay, fall!

In the olden days, one used to loop through arrays by repeatedly increasing an index counter (often called $i), and then indexing the array with it. This is now considered gauche and primitive.

Our good friend the topic variable $_ shows up again here. The for loop takes care of binding it to the appropriate value; in this case, it is bound to each element in the array in turn. Since the array contains four elements, we make four iterations through it. Simple.

So, to summarize, given sets the topic for a single value, whereas for sets the topic for each of the elements in an array or list.

Sometimes we want a more descriptive name than just $_. The topic variable is fine for shorter loops, but when programs get larger and one can't see the closing brace of a block from its opening brace, it increasingly makes sense to name the variable something else.

We could do this each time:

my @seasons = "winter", "spring", "summer", "fall";

for @seasons {
    my $season = $_;
    say "Yay, $season!";
}

But there's a nicer way:

my @seasons = "winter", "spring", "summer", "fall";

for @seasons -> $season {
    say "Yay, $season!";
}

In the latter case, $_ is not set, so any value that it had before will be preserved. You could think of it as the "default" of a for loop being -> $_, which is correct enough for now.

We don't have to loop over arrays, either. Here's a short program that loops over the words that we input:

my $sentence = prompt "Enter a sentence: ";

for $sentence.words -> $word {
    say "'$word' has $word.chars() characters";
}

Running the program could look like this:

Enter a sentence: This isn't my hamster
'This' has 4 characters
'isn't' has 5 characters
'my' has 2 characters
'hamster' has 7 characters

Two new methods above: .words is a method on a string that returns a list of contiguous "word characters" (anything but whitespace).

.chars gives the length (number of characters) of a string. Note that we can even do method calls and have them interpolate in strings; the proviso is that we end in parentheses (()).

That's it for today. Tomorrow we'll have a look at regexes, whatever that may be. :-)