OO sub, hash or hash reference.

[IOrdy]

What I would like to do is be able to pass either a hash or a hash reference to my object method. And regardless of what is passed I would like it to end up as a hash reference. I searched here and damian's OOPerl book (which I'm not very far through) but couldn't find an example. I'm sure this is just a simple question (possibly redundant) but I cant figure it out and it's late at night.

[dragonchild]

There's a few ways you could do it. I'd do it as such:

sub someMethod {
    my $self = shift;

    my $hashRef;
    if (UNIVERSAL::isa($_[0], 'HASH')) {
        $hashRef = shift;
    } else {
        $hashRef = { @_ };
    }
}

Of course, you can add more checks and lots of cool stuff. But, that's basically the idea.

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

[dreadpiratepeter]

Out of curiosity, why the isa instead of a ref($_[0]) eq 'HASH'?

-pete
Entropy is not what is used to be.

[IOrdy]

after seeing the above code I did some reading:

"The reason the original test is fragile ( ref($_[0]) eq 'HASH' ) is that it will make your code refuse to work on a hash if it happens to be blessed."

It was simpler than I thought.

[dash2]

Assuming you aren't too bothered about blessed references, how about this?

sub xxx {
        my $class = shift;
        my $args = ($#_ == 0) ? { %{ (shift) } } : { @_ };

NB: not my own work.

dave hj~