Stringify objects with overloaded stringification

[liz]

By using overload it is possible to change the standard stringification of an object. This is a very nice and wonderful feature, which can be a bit of a pain during development and debugging. It is at those times, I have found myself wanting to get the standard stringification for an object, just as a visual aid for debugging.

This little sub does just that: it gives you the standard stringification.

I wonder if it would make sense to add this to Scalar::Util as well.

use Scalar::Util qw(blessed reftype refaddr);
sub stringify ($) {sprintf "%s=%s(0x%x)",blessed $_[0],reftype $_[0],r
+efaddr $_[0]}

[ysth]

overload::StrVal??

[liz]

Indeed. In hindsight, it's a logical place and name for such functionality, but (as may be clear) I didn't find it. I guess I should have phrased is as a SOPW then, rather than creating a subroutine to do this. ;-) as I could have known someone would already have made something like that.

On the other hand, this will work even if overload is not loaded, so you can apply it to a blessed value always. So there is some merit in doing it this way.

Learned something again today (well, actually, it's already tomorrow here ;-)

Liz