Perl wantarray Function



Description

This function returns true if the context of the currently executing function is looking for a list value. Returns false in a scalar context.

Syntax

Following is the simple syntax for this function −

wantarray

Return Value

This function returns undef if no context and 0 if lvalue expects a scalar.

Example

Following is the example code showing its basic usage −

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

sub foo {
   return(wantarray() ? qw(A, B, C) : '1');
}

$result = foo();    # scalar context
@result = foo();    # array context

print("foo() in a  scalar context: $result\n");
print("foo() in an array  context:
@result\n");

When above code is executed, it produces the following result −

foo() in a  scalar context: 1
foo() in an array  context:
A, B, C
perl_function_references.htm
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