Question

In Perl, an object is just a reference to any of the basic Perl data types that has been blessed into a particular class. When you use the ref() function on an unblessed reference, you are told what data type the reference points to. However, when you call ref() on a blessed reference, you are returned the name of the package that reference has been blessed into.

I want to know the actual underlying type of the blessed reference. How can I determine this?

Answer 1

Scalar::Util::reftype() is the cleanest solution. The Scalar::Util module was added to the Perl core in version 5.7 but is available for older versions (5.004 or later) from CPAN.

You can also probe with UNIVERSAL::isa():

$x->isa('HASH')             # if $x is known to be an object UNIVERSAL::isa($x, 'HASH')  # if $x might not be an object or reference 

Obviously, you’d also have to check for ARRAY and SCALAR types. The UNIVERSAL module (which serves as the base class for all objects) has been part of the core since Perl 5.003.

Another way — easy but a little dirty — is to stringify the reference. Assuming that the class hasn’t overloaded stringification you’ll get back something resembling Class=HASH(0x1234ABCD), which you can parse to extract the underlying data type:

my $type = ($object =~ /=(.+)\(0x[0-9a-f]+\)$/i);