passing a variables name to a subroutine

[LANTI]

Hi Monks,
for a debugging-sub I would like to pass the name of a variable to the sub. How is this possible?

What I have so far (untested yet):

say sdump($some_ref);

sub sdump {
    my $ref = shift || croak('nothing to dump - missing ref');
    my $depth = shift || 2;
    local $Data::Dumper::Maxdepth = $depth;
    return 'Dump of $var_name: ' . "\n" . Dumper($ref)
}

How can I get the $var_name('$some_ref' in this exemple) into the sub?

[moritz]

for a debugging-sub I would like to pass the name of a variable to the sub. How is this possible?

my $x;
yoursub '$x';

Inside your sub you can use PadWalker to access foreign lexical variables, and caller plus symbol table magic for package variables.

[LANTI]

hmh ... seems not to work, if the dumped ref is a lexical variable in production-code. For the moment I live with this solution - not very elegant, because most of the time the identifying string will be same as the var-name:

say sdump($pout, '$pout');

sub sdump {
    my $ref = shift || croak('nothing to dump - missing ref');
    my $name = shift || 'n/a';
    my $depth = shift || 2;
    local $Data::Dumper::Maxdepth = $depth;
    return "Dump of $name:\n" . Dumper($ref);
}

Any idea, how to call it this way?

sdump('$pout');

[moritz]

hmh ... seems not to work, if the dumped ref is a lexical variable in production-code.

With which code did it not work? Did you try PadWalker as I suggested? How the the production code differ from the test code?

[jdporter]

Congrats on winning 888888. :-)

[Anonymous Monk]

Displaying a variable's name and value in a sub