From the course: Perl 5 Essential Training
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Finding the type of a reference - Perl Tutorial
From the course: Perl 5 Essential Training
Finding the type of a reference
- [Voiceover] Sometimes you may need to know the type of a reference, so you can process it accordingly. Perl provides the built-in function "ref" for this purpose. Here is a working copy of ref.pl from Chapter 11 of the Exercise Files. And you will notice up here around line seven, I declare a reference to an anonymous array, and in line eight, I declare a reference to anonymous hash. So, on line seven it's an array ref, and on line eight it's a hash ref. And then I call display_ref twice, once with each of these, and display_ref simply uses the ref function to display the type of the reference. So when I run this, you'll notice that we have two results, one says "array", and one says "hash". The display_ref for the array reference displays the word "array", and for the hash reference, it displays the word "hash". And that's because the ref function right here returns a string, and the string is a representation of type of reference it is. So, for an array reference, it will say…
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