Question

Is there any way to get Perl to convert the stringified version e.g (ARRAY(0x8152c28)) of an array reference to the actual array reference?

For example

perl -e 'use Data::Dumper; $a = [1,2,3];$b = $a; $a = $a.""; warn Dumper (Then some magic happens);'

would yield

$VAR1 = [
      1,
      2,
      3
    ];

Answer 1

Yes, you can do this (even without Inline C). An example:

use strict;
use warnings;

# make a stringified reference
my $array_ref = [ qw/foo bar baz/ ];
my $stringified_ref = "$array_ref";

use B; # core module providing introspection facilities
# extract the hex address
my ($addr) = $stringified_ref =~ /.*(0x\w+)/;
# fake up a B object of the correct class for this type of reference
# and convert it back to a real reference
my $real_ref = bless(\(0+hex $addr), "B::AV")->object_2svref;

print join(",", @$real_ref), "\n";

but don’t do that. If your actual object is freed or reused, you may very well
end up getting segfaults.

Whatever you are actually trying to achieve, there is certainly a better way.
A comment to another answer reveals that the stringification is due to using a reference as a hash key. As responded to there, the better way to do that is the well-battle-tested
Tie::RefHash.