Can you force either a scalar or array ref to be an array in Perl?

Question

I have a perl variable $results that gets returned from a service. The value is supposed to be an array, and $results should be an array reference. However, when the array has only one item in it, $results will be set to that value, and not a referenced array that contains that one item.

I want to do a foreach loop on the expected array. Without checking ref($results) eq 'ARRAY', is there any way to have something equivalent to the following:

foreach my $result (@$results) {     # Process $result } 

That particular code sample will work for the reference, but will complain for the simple scalar.

EDIT: I should clarify that there is no way for me to change what is returned from the service. The problem is that the value will be a scalar when there is only one value and it will be an array reference when there is more than one value.

Answer 1

im not sure there's any other way than:

$result = [ $result ]   if ref($result) ne 'ARRAY';   foreach ..... 

Answer 2

Another solution would be to wrap the call to the server and have it always return an array to simplify the rest of your life:

sub call_to_service {     my $returnValue = service::call();      if (ref($returnValue) eq "ARRAY")     {         return($returnValue);     }     else     {        return( [$returnValue] );     } } 

Then you can always know that you will get back a reference to an array, even if it was only one item.

foreach my $item (@{call_to_service()}) {   ... }