How to make a hash of objects in perl

Question

I would like to be able to store objects in a hash structure so I can work with the name of the object as a variable. Could someone help me make a sub new{ ... } routine that creates a new object as member of a hash? I am not exactly sure how to go about doing this or how to refer to and/or use the object when it is stored like this. I just want to be able to use and refer to the name of the object for other subroutines.

See my comment in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3605685/how-to-get-name-of-object-in-perl for why I want to do this.

Thank you

Answer 1

Objects don't really have names. Why are you trying to give them names? One of the fundamental points of references is that you don't need to know a name, or even what class it is, to work with it.

There's probably a much better way to achieve your task.

However, since objects are just references, and references are just scalars, the object can be a hash value:

my %hash = (
    some_name => Class->new( ... ),
    other_name => Class->new( ... ).
    );

You might want to check out a book such as Intermediate Perl to learn how references and objects work.

Answer 2

Don't quite understand what you are trying to do. Perhaps you can provide some concrete examples?

You can store objects into hashes just like any other variable in perl.

my %hash = ( );
$hash{'foo'} = new Foo(...);
$hash{'bar'} = new Bar(...);

Assuming you know the object stored at 'foo' is a Foo object and at 'bar' is a Bar object, then you can retrieve the objects from the hash and use it.

$hash{'foo'}->foo_method();
$hash{'bar'}->bar_method();

You may want to programmatically determine this behavior at run time. That's assuming that you are sticking with this naming scheme.