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From: PerlFAQ Server on 27 Jun 2010 06:00
This is an excerpt from the latest version perlfaq4.pod, which
comes with the standard Perl distribution. These postings aim to
reduce the number of repeated questions as well as allow the community
to review and update the answers. The latest version of the complete
perlfaq is at http://faq.perl.org .

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4.47: How do I handle circular lists?

(contributed by brian d foy)

If you want to cycle through an array endlessly, you can increment the
index modulo the number of elements in the array:

my @array = qw( a b c );
my $i = 0;

while( 1 ) {
print $array[ $i++ % @array ], "\n";
last if $i > 20;
}

You can also use "Tie::Cycle" to use a scalar that always has the next
element of the circular array:

use Tie::Cycle;

tie my $cycle, 'Tie::Cycle', [ qw( FFFFFF 000000 FFFF00 ) ];

print $cycle; # FFFFFF
print $cycle; # 000000
print $cycle; # FFFF00

The "Array::Iterator::Circular" creates an iterator object for circular
arrays:

use Array::Iterator::Circular;

my $color_iterator = Array::Iterator::Circular->new(
qw(red green blue orange)
);

foreach ( 1 .. 20 ) {
print $color_iterator->next, "\n";
}



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