http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=451506


in reply to Copy of an anonymous hash?

Dear Anonymous,
The topic of your problem is called deep copy
and it's worth while searchingfor it ...
and he has a column on it ...

pelagic

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Copy of an anonymous hash?
by salva (Canon) on Apr 26, 2005 at 12:18 UTC
    deep copy is not always the solution:

    There is shallow copy in one extreme and deep copy in the other an in the middle lots of intermediate solutions, which one is the good one depends on the particular data representation.

    For instance, if you are cloning an object representing an XML node, you will like to deep-copy all its children but not the pointer to its parent.

[reply]
      100% agreed!
      I didn't say deep copy is the solution, I said it's the topic ;)

      pelagic
[reply]

      Shallow copy is usually a good solution: all you need is to do a shallow copy whenever you change a structure.

[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom