| Subject: | a deref function to complement reftype |
---
every so often, i find myself wanting to write code like:
my @vals = ref $arg ? @$arg : $arg;
i was looking around cpan and was tempted to write a generic Sub::Deref, until i realized such a function is a nice complement to Scalar::Util::reftype. Below i have 2 pure perl implementations. I have no idea what the XS code would look like, but i wanted to see if any of the maintainers would be interested in including such a function. I'd be up for writing the unit tests.
sub deref($) {
my $type = Scalar::Util::reftype $_[0];
return $type
?
$type eq 'ARRAY' ? @{$_[0]} :
$type eq 'CODE' ? &{$_[0]} :
$type eq 'GLOB' ? *{$_[0]} :
$type eq 'HASH' ? %{$_[0]} :
$type eq 'REF' ? ${$_[0]} :
$type eq 'SCALAR' ? ${$_[0]} :
die "$type can't be dereferenced"
: $_[0];
}
my %reftype_to_dereferencer = (
ARRAY => sub { @{$_[0]} },
CODE => sub { &{$_[0]} },
GLOB => sub { *{$_[0]} },
HASH => sub { %{$_[0]} },
REF => sub { ${$_[0]} },
SCALAR => sub { ${$_[0]} },
);
sub deref($) {
my $type = Scalar::Util::reftype $_[0];
return $_[0] unless $type;
my $dereferencer = $reftype_to_dereferencer{$type};
die "$type can't be dereferenced" unless $dereferencer;
return $dereferencer->($_[0]);
}
---
[copied from https://github.com/Scalar-List-Utils/Scalar-List-Utils/issues/3]