Question

I want to use an obj->log($msg) function to store strings, and then later dump them

UPDATED:

use warnings;
use strict;
use diagnostics;
package obj;


  sub log{
      my($self,$log_info) = @_;

      push(@{$self->{log}},$log_info);  

  }

  sub showlog{

    my($self) = @_;
    my $counter = 0;
    my @log= @{$self->{log}};

    print '<div id="log" class="_view _debug"><h1>Log Data</h1>';


        foreach my $i (@log) {
            $counter++;
          print '<div class="item',(($counter%2)?' alt':''),'"><em class="tag">',$counter,'</em><pre>';
          print(Dumper($i));
          print $i;
          print '</pre></div>';
        }
      print '</div>';
  }

but I can’t figure out how to append new items to $self->{log} — I come from PHP land so this is a bit painful.

It would be nice if I could have log be any sort of data, and just dump it out, array, hash or scalar… is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

Hashes values must be scalars. If you want to store multiple values in hash value, you’ll need to find a way of placing multiple values in a scalar. A way that would work well here involves storing a reference to an array in the hash value:

$self->{log} = [];  # Optional because of autovivification.

Then place the multiple values in the referenced array:

push @{ $self->{log} }, $log_info;

One would iterate over the values as follows:

for my $entry (@{ $self->{log} }) {

If you want to use index for $i % 2, you can use:

my $log = $self->{log};
for my $i (0..$#$log) {
   my $entry = $log->[$i];
   ...
}

---

Note: Since 5.14.0,

push $self->{log}, ...;

is mostly equivalent to

push @{ $self->{log} }, ...;

Perl 5.14 is pretty new, so you might want to stay away from that for unless you’re just coding for yourself.