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Manpages PERLREFSection: Perl Programmers Reference Guide (1)Updated: 2005-03-28 Index Return to Main Contents NAMEperlref - Perl references and nested data structuresNOTEThis is complete documentation about all aspects of references. For a shorter, tutorial introduction to just the essential features, see perlreftut.DESCRIPTIONBefore release 5 of Perl it was difficult to represent complex data structures, because all references had to be symbolic-and even then it was difficult to refer to a variable instead of a symbol table entry. Perl now not only makes it easier to use symbolic references to variables, but also lets you have ``hard'' references to any piece of data or code. Any scalar may hold a hard reference. Because arrays and hashes contain scalars, you can now easily build arrays of arrays, arrays of hashes, hashes of arrays, arrays of hashes of functions, and so on.Hard references are smart-they keep track of reference counts for you, automatically freeing the thing referred to when its reference count goes to zero. (Reference counts for values in self-referential or cyclic data structures may not go to zero without a little help; see ``Two-Phased Garbage Collection'' in perlobj for a detailed explanation.) If that thing happens to be an object, the object is destructed. See perlobj for more about objects. (In a sense, everything in Perl is an object, but we usually reserve the word for references to objects that have been officially ``blessed'' into a class package.) Symbolic references are names of variables or other objects, just as a symbolic link in a Unix filesystem contains merely the name of a file. The *glob notation is something of a of symbolic reference. (Symbolic references are sometimes called ``soft references'', but please don't call them that; references are confusing enough without useless synonyms.) In contrast, hard references are more like hard links in a Unix file system: They are used to access an underlying object without concern for what its (other) name is. When the word ``reference'' is used without an adjective, as in the following paragraph, it is usually talking about a hard reference. References are easy to use in Perl. There is just one overriding principle: Perl does no implicit referencing or dereferencing. When a scalar is holding a reference, it always behaves as a simple scalar. It doesn't magically start being an array or hash or subroutine; you have to tell it explicitly to do so, by dereferencing it. Making ReferencesReferences can be created in several ways.
Using ReferencesThat's it for creating references. By now you're probably dying to know how to use references to get back to your long-lost data. There are several basic methods.
Using a string or number as a reference produces a symbolic reference, as explained above. Using a reference as a number produces an integer representing its storage location in memory. The only useful thing to be done with this is to compare two references numerically to see whether they refer to the same location.
if ($ref1 == $ref2) { # cheap numeric compare of references print "refs 1 and 2 refer to the same thing\n"; }Using a reference as a string produces both its referent's type, including any package blessing as described in perlobj, as well as the numeric address expressed in hex. The ref() operator returns just the type of thing the reference is pointing to, without the address. See ``ref'' in perlfunc for details and examples of its use. The bless() operator may be used to associate the object a reference points to with a package functioning as an object class. See perlobj. A typeglob may be dereferenced the same way a reference can, because the dereference syntax always indicates the type of reference desired. So "${*foo}" and "${\$foo}" both indicate the same scalar variable. Here's a trick for interpolating a subroutine call into a string:
print "My sub returned @{[mysub(1,2,3)]} that time.\n";The way it works is that when the "@{...}" is seen in the double-quoted string, it's evaluated as a block. The block creates a reference to an anonymous array containing the results of the call to "mysub(1,2,3)". So the whole block returns a reference to an array, which is then dereferenced by "@{...}" and stuck into the double-quoted string. This chicanery is also useful for arbitrary expressions:
print "That yields @{[$n + 5]} widgets\n"; Symbolic referencesWe said that references spring into existence as necessary if they are undefined, but we didn't say what happens if a value used as a reference is already defined, but isn't a hard reference. If you use it as a reference, it'll be treated as a symbolic reference. That is, the value of the scalar is taken to be the name of a variable, rather than a direct link to a (possibly) anonymous value.People frequently expect it to work like this. So it does.
$name = "foo"; $$name = 1; # Sets $foo ${$name} = 2; # Sets $foo ${$name x 2} = 3; # Sets $foofoo $name->[0] = 4; # Sets $foo[0] @$name = (); # Clears @foo &$name(); # Calls &foo() (as in Perl 4) $pack = "THAT"; ${"${pack}::$name"} = 5; # Sets $THAT::foo without evalThis is powerful, and slightly dangerous, in that it's possible to intend (with the utmost sincerity) to use a hard reference, and accidentally use a symbolic reference instead. To protect against that, you can say
use strict 'refs';and then only hard references will be allowed for the rest of the enclosing block. An inner block may countermand that with
no strict 'refs';Only package variables (globals, even if localized) are visible to symbolic references. Lexical variables (declared with my()) aren't in a symbol table, and thus are invisible to this mechanism. For example:
local $value = 10; $ref = "value"; { my $value = 20; print $$ref; }This will still print 10, not 20. Remember that local() affects package variables, which are all ``global'' to the package. Not-so-symbolic referencesA new feature contributing to readability in perl version 5.001 is that the brackets around a symbolic reference behave more like quotes, just as they always have within a string. That is,
$push = "pop on "; print "${push}over";has always meant to print ``pop on over'', even though push is a reserved word. This has been generalized to work the same outside of quotes, so that
print ${push} . "over";and even
print ${ push } . "over";will have the same effect. (This would have been a syntax error in Perl 5.000, though Perl 4 allowed it in the spaceless form.) This construct is not considered to be a symbolic reference when you're using strict refs:
use strict 'refs'; ${ bareword }; # Okay, means $bareword. ${ "bareword" }; # Error, symbolic reference.Similarly, because of all the subscripting that is done using single words, we've applied the same rule to any bareword that is used for subscripting a hash. So now, instead of writing
$array{ "aaa" }{ "bbb" }{ "ccc" }you can write just
$array{ aaa }{ bbb }{ ccc }and not worry about whether the subscripts are reserved words. In the rare event that you do wish to do something like
$array{ shift }you can force interpretation as a reserved word by adding anything that makes it more than a bareword:
$array{ shift() } $array{ +shift } $array{ shift @_ }The "use warnings" pragma or the -w switch will warn you if it interprets a reserved word as a string. But it will no longer warn you about using lowercase words, because the string is effectively quoted. Pseudo-hashes: Using an array as a hashWARNING: This section describes an experimental feature. Details may change without notice in future versions.Beginning with release 5.005 of Perl, you may use an array reference in some contexts that would normally require a hash reference. This allows you to access array elements using symbolic names, as if they were fields in a structure. For this to work, the array must contain extra information. The first element of the array has to be a hash reference that maps field names to array indices. Here is an example:
$struct = [{foo => 1, bar => 2}, "FOO", "BAR"]; $struct->{foo}; # same as $struct->[1], i.e. "FOO" $struct->{bar}; # same as $struct->[2], i.e. "BAR" keys %$struct; # will return ("foo", "bar") in some order values %$struct; # will return ("FOO", "BAR") in same some order while (my($k,$v) = each %$struct) { print "$k => $v\n"; }Perl will raise an exception if you try to access nonexistent fields. To avoid inconsistencies, always use the fields::phash() function provided by the "fields" pragma.
use fields; $pseudohash = fields::phash(foo => "FOO", bar => "BAR");For better performance, Perl can also do the translation from field names to array indices at compile time for typed object references. See fields. There are two ways to check for the existence of a key in a pseudo-hash. The first is to use exists(). This checks to see if the given field has ever been set. It acts this way to match the behavior of a regular hash. For instance:
use fields; $phash = fields::phash([qw(foo bar pants)], ['FOO']); $phash->{pants} = undef; print exists $phash->{foo}; # true, 'foo' was set in the declaration print exists $phash->{bar}; # false, 'bar' has not been used. print exists $phash->{pants}; # true, your 'pants' have been touchedThe second is to use exists() on the hash reference sitting in the first array element. This checks to see if the given key is a valid field in the pseudo-hash.
print exists $phash->[0]{bar}; # true, 'bar' is a valid field print exists $phash->[0]{shoes};# false, 'shoes' can't be useddelete() on a pseudo-hash element only deletes the value corresponding to the key, not the key itself. To delete the key, you'll have to explicitly delete it from the first hash element.
print delete $phash->{foo}; # prints $phash->[1], "FOO" print exists $phash->{foo}; # false print exists $phash->[0]{foo}; # true, key still exists print delete $phash->[0]{foo}; # now key is gone print $phash->{foo}; # runtime exception Function TemplatesAs explained above, a closure is an anonymous function with access to the lexical variables visible when that function was compiled. It retains access to those variables even though it doesn't get run until later, such as in a signal handler or a Tk callback.Using a closure as a function template allows us to generate many functions that act similarly. Suppose you wanted functions named after the colors that generated HTML font changes for the various colors:
print "Be ", red("careful"), "with that ", green("light");The red() and green() functions would be similar. To create these, we'll assign a closure to a typeglob of the name of the function we're trying to build.
@colors = qw(red blue green yellow orange purple violet); for my $name (@colors) { no strict 'refs'; # allow symbol table manipulation *$name = *{uc $name} = sub { "<FONT COLOR='$name'>@_</FONT>" }; }Now all those different functions appear to exist independently. You can call red(), RED(), blue(), BLUE(), green(), etc. This technique saves on both compile time and memory use, and is less error-prone as well, since syntax checks happen at compile time. It's critical that any variables in the anonymous subroutine be lexicals in order to create a proper closure. That's the reasons for the "my" on the loop iteration variable. This is one of the only places where giving a prototype to a closure makes much sense. If you wanted to impose scalar context on the arguments of these functions (probably not a wise idea for this particular example), you could have written it this way instead:
*$name = sub ($) { "<FONT COLOR='$name'>$_[0]</FONT>" };However, since prototype checking happens at compile time, the assignment above happens too late to be of much use. You could address this by putting the whole loop of assignments within a BEGIN block, forcing it to occur during compilation. Access to lexicals that change over type-like those in the "for" loop above-only works with closures, not general subroutines. In the general case, then, named subroutines do not nest properly, although anonymous ones do. If you are accustomed to using nested subroutines in other programming languages with their own private variables, you'll have to work at it a bit in Perl. The intuitive coding of this type of thing incurs mysterious warnings about ``will not stay shared''. For example, this won't work:
sub outer { my $x = $_[0] + 35; sub inner { return $x * 19 } # WRONG return $x + inner(); }A work-around is the following:
sub outer { my $x = $_[0] + 35; local *inner = sub { return $x * 19 }; return $x + inner(); }Now inner() can only be called from within outer(), because of the temporary assignments of the closure (anonymous subroutine). But when it does, it has normal access to the lexical variable $x from the scope of outer(). This has the interesting effect of creating a function local to another function, something not normally supported in Perl. WARNINGYou may not (usefully) use a reference as the key to a hash. It will be converted into a string:
$x{ \$a } = $a;If you try to dereference the key, it won't do a hard dereference, and you won't accomplish what you're attempting. You might want to do something more like
$r = \@a; $x{ $r } = $r;And then at least you can use the values(), which will be real refs, instead of the keys(), which won't. The standard Tie::RefHash module provides a convenient workaround to this. SEE ALSOBesides the obvious documents, source code can be instructive. Some pathological examples of the use of references can be found in the t/op/ref.t regression test in the Perl source directory.See also perldsc and perllol for how to use references to create complex data structures, and perltoot, perlobj, and perlbot for how to use them to create objects.
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