How to merge two arrays, alternating values from each array, in perl

Question

Suppose I have 2 arrays like mentioned below

@a1 = ("Vinay", Raj, harry);
@b1 = ("dude","rock");

After merging I want to have result like this

[
    Vinay
    dude
    Vinay
    rock
    Raj
    dude
    Raj
    rock
    harry
    dude
    harry
    rock
]

basically I want to merge the each index values of array1 to all the index values of array2.

Adding to the above question I have another query.

For the same question above how to merge 2 arrays at particular array index. For example I have 2 arrays of each 160 elements, now I want to merge array at every 5th element in sets, is that possible?

Answer 1

Just make a new array:

my @merged = (@a1, @b1);

Here's a complete example:

my @a1 = ("foo", "bar");
my @a2 = ("baz", "spam");

my @merged = (@a1, @a2);

print $merged[3]; #=> "spam"

EDIT: I missed the ordering requirement. You just need to zip them together, which you can do with List::MoreUtils:

use List::MoreUtils qw(zip);
use Data::Dumper qw(Dumper);

my @a1 = ("Vinay", "Raj", "harry");
my @a2 = ("dude", "rock");

my @merged = zip(@a1, @a2);

print Dumper(\@merged);