Question

I am trying to read a global symbol from another package. I have the package name as a string.
I am using qualify_to_ref from Symbol module

    my $ref  = qualify_to_ref ( 'myarray', 'Mypackage' ) ;
    my @array =  @$ref ;

gives me Not an ARRAY reference at ...... I presume I am getting the format of the dereference wrong.

Here is a complete example program.

    use strict;
    use Symbol ;

    package Mypackage ;
    our @myarray = qw/a b/ ;

    package main ;

    my $ref  = qualify_to_ref ( 'myarray', 'Mypackage' ) ;
    my @array =  @$ref ;

Answer 1

The qualify_to_ref function returns a typeglob reference, which you can de-reference like this:

my @array =  @{*$ref};

The typeglob dereferencing syntax is documented here.