NAME

Syntax::Operator::In - infix element-of-list meta-operator

SYNOPSIS

On Perl v5.38 or later:

use Syntax::Operator::In;

if($x in:eq @some_strings) {
   say "x is one of the given strings";
}

DESCRIPTION

This module provides an infix meta-operator that implements a element-of-list test on either strings or numbers.

Support for custom infix operators was added in the Perl 5.37.x development cycle and is available from development release v5.37.7 onwards, and therefore in Perl v5.38 onwards. The documentation of XS::Parse::Infix describes the situation in more detail.

While Perl versions before this do not support custom infix operators, they can still be used via XS::Parse::Infix and hence XS::Parse::Keyword. Custom keywords which attempt to parse operator syntax may be able to use these.

For operators that already specialize on string or numerical equality, see instead Syntax::Operator::Elem.

OPERATORS

in

my $present = $lhs in:OP @rhs;

my $present = $lhs in<OP> @rhs;

Yields true if the value on the lefhand side is equal to any of the values in the list on the right, according to some equality test operator OP.

This test operator must be either eq for string match, or == for number match, or any other custom infix operator that is registered in the XPI_CLS_EQUALITY classification.

There are currently two accepted forms of the syntax for this operator, using either a prefix colon or a circumfix pair of angle-brackets. They are entirely identical in semantics, differing only in the surface-level syntax to notate them. This is because I'm still entirely undecided on which notation is better in terms of readable neatness, flexibility, parsing ambiguity and so on. This is somewhat of an experiment to see which will eventually win.

TODO

• Improve runtime performance of compiletime-constant sets of strings, by detecting when the RHS contains string constants and convert it into a hash lookup.

• Consider cross-module integration with Syntax::Keyword::Match, permitting

  match($val : elem) {
     case(@arr_of_strings) { ... }
  }

  Or perhaps this would be too weird, and maybe match/case should have an "any-of" list/array matching ability itself. See also https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=143482.

AUTHOR

Paul Evans <leonerd@leonerd.org.uk>