Re: determining reference type

[Andrew Gaffney]

WC -Sx- Jones wrote:
Andrew Gaffney wrote:

How do you determine what type of data a reference points to? I have a 
function (one in previous post) that can take either an array of 
scalars or an array of hash references. I want to execute different 
code based on which one it was. How can I do that?

use the ref() function -
    perldoc -f ref
        sub marshall {
             my($thing) = @_;
             $type = ref($thing);
             if ($type eq "ARRAY") {
                  return(encode_list($thing));
             }
             elsif ($type eq "HASH") {
                  return(encode_hash($thing));
             }
             elsif (!$type) {
                  return(encode_scalar($thing));
             }
             else { die("Can't handle $type\n"); }
        }
http://www.usenix.org/publications/perl/perl12.html
That did the trick. Thanks.

--
Andrew Gaffney
Network Administrator
Skyline Aeronautics, LLC.
636-357-1548
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