The Arrow Operators

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# 10.5. The Arrow Operators

An arrow (`->`) followed by a square or curly brackets can be used to directly access the elements of an array or a hash referenced by a certain hash. For instance: `$array_ref->[5]` will retrieve the 5th element of the array pointed to by `$array_ref`.

As an example let's print a tree of the contents of the part of the lecture that was presented in the previous slide:

    use strict;
    use warnings;

    do "lol.pl";         # Load the other file

    my $cont = get_contents();

    print $cont->{'title'}, "\n";
    print $cont->{'subs'}->[0]->{'url'}, "\n";
    print $cont->{'subs'}->[0]->{'subs'}->[1]->{'title'}, "\n";

Note that the arrows following the first arrow are optional as perl sees that the programmer wishes to access the subseqeunt sub-items. However, the first one is mandatory because the expression `$array_ref{'elem'}` looks for the hash `%array_ref`.

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