How do I get the type of a blessed ref? (ARRAY|HASH|SCALAR)

Question

I'm passed a reference, and I want to know its type. For this purpose, "ref" works on unblessed references, but on blessed references it returns the package name it was blessed with.

     $a=[];
     print ref $a;

ARRAY

     bless $a, 'mytype';
     print ref $a;

mytype

How can I get the type?

Answer 1

use Scalar::Util 'reftype';
print reftype bless {}; # HASH

Answer 2

You can use Scalar::Util::reftype for this, but in general it isn't something that you need to do. Usually people asking this question indicates they are doing something else in a less than ideal way. So, why do you think you need to know?

Answer 3

As stated in a comment above.. you are incorrect if you think that external code needs to be aware of the implementation details of a blessed object. If you need to do something like Data::Dumper on the object, create a dump() method on the module which contains the implementation logic. You could add some code into the UNIVERSAL class's autoloader so that it just calls Data::Dumper if you attempt to call dump() on an object that doesn't define it.