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How to get the index of specific element of an array in Perl 6 ?

Given an array like this:

my @levels = <TRACE DEBUG INFO WARNING ERROR FATAL>;

and give one of the names, e.g. 'DEBUG', how can we know which element is it?

• grep-index
• index

In Perl 6 it is easy. There is a method called grep-index that will return the index of the matching element.

examples/array_element_index_grep.pl6

use v6;

my @levels = <TRACE DEBUG INFO WARNING ERROR FATAL>;
my $res = @levels.grep-index('DEBUG');
say $res;       # 1


say $res.WHAT;  # (List)

The WHAT method here revealed that the grep-index method actually returns a List. That's especialy usefule if the same element appears more than once. In that case grep-index will return the list of all the indices and if we want, we can access each individual index using square brackets:

examples/array_element_index_grep_duplicate.pl6

use v6;

my @levels = <TRACE DEBUG INFO WARNING ERROR DEBUG FATAL>;
my $res = @levels.grep-index('DEBUG');
say $res;         # 1 5


say $res.WHAT;    # (List)
say $res.elems;   # 2
say $res[0];      # 1
say $res[1];      # 5

index

I was a bit surprised to see that the plain index method converts the array into a string and returns the location of the value passed to it within that string:

examples/array_element_index.pl6

use v6;

my @levels = <TRACE DEBUG INFO WARNING ERROR FATAL>;
my $res = @levels.index('DEBUG');
say $res;       # 6

say $res.WHAT;  # (Int)

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Written by Gabor Szabo

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Published on 2015-01-24

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