Recursively printing data structures in Perl

Question

I am currently learning Perl. I have Perl hash that contains references to hashes and arrays. The hashes and arrays may in turn contain references to other hashes/arrays.

Answer 1

You could have separated out the code blocks that dealt with arrays, and hashes.

sub recurse{
  ...
  recurse_A(@_) if $ref eq 'ARRAY';
  recurse_H(@_) if $ref eq 'HASH';
  ...
}

sub recurse_A{ ... }
sub recurse_H{ ... }

I would recommend starting out your subroutines like this, unless you have a real good reason for doing otherwise.

sub example{
  my( $one, $two, $three, $optional_four ) = @_;

( If you do it like this then Komodo, at least, will be able to figure out what the arguments are to your subroutine )

There is rarely any reason to put a variable into a string containing only the variable.

"$var" eq $var;

The only time I can think I would ever do that is when I am using an object that has an overloaded "" function, and I want to get the string, without also getting the object.

package My_Class;
use overload
  '""' => 'Stringify',
;
sub new{
  my( $class, $name ) = @_;
  my $self = bless { name => $name }, $class;
  return $self;
}
sub Stringify{
  my( $self ) = @_;
  return $self->{name};
}

my $object = My_Class->new;
my $string = "$object";