Webmaster Forum / Perl / Getting Started / February 2005

* Vladimir D Belousov <maillist@klarnet.ru> [2005-02-28T07:01:02]

I believe you are asking: Is there Perl equivalent to C's switch/case
construct?

Not exactly.

To see the official Perl documentation on this, run: perldoc -q case

This will search the FAQs for the keyword "case" and in the second
question you'll get some information, and a pointer to another bit of
Perl documentation, the "perlsyn" page.

A common idiom is something like this:

 SWITCH: for ($value) {
   /regex/    and do { something($x); last SWITCH };
   /regex/    and do { something($y); last SWITCH };
   (! $value) and do { something(0);  last SWITCH };

   something($default);
 }

The documentation mentions Switch, the module.  While Switch is neat, I
wouldn't suggest using it in production.