Let's say you have an array of fruit that contains apple, banana, orange, and grape.

my @fruits = qw(apple banana orange grapes);

Each value in the array has a unique index integer.

• $fruits[0] = apple
• $fruits[1] = banana
• $fruits[2] = orange
• $fruits[3] = grapes

Splice can be used to add or remove any value in an array. To remove "orange", the second splice parameter must be the integer that correlates to the value you want to remove. In other words, specifying 2 removes orange.

splice (@fruits, 2, 1);

In a Perl script, you typically will not know the integers that correlate to the values. You could create a variable that contains a value of 0.

my $index = 0;

Count the number of lines in the array. In this example, $count will contain a value of 4.

my $count = @fruits;

Increment $index by 1 until a line in the @fruits array equals "grapes" or when $index equals $count.

++$index until $fruits[$index] eq "grapes" or $index eq $count;

Splice can be used to remove a value from the array. In this example, every occurence of "grapes" will be removed from @fruits.

splice (@fruits, $index, 1);

Be aware that if lines in the array contain double quotes, this probably will fail to work as expected, since the comparison is wrapped in double quotes, like this.

until $fruits[$index] eq "value"