How do you identify a reference?

ukryule has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm calling a method which returns an array of 'things' - which could be references or scalars (text). Is there a 'is_scalar' or 'is_reference' function? I want to do something like this:

@children = $h->content_list;
foreach $c (@children)
{
   if (is_scalar($c)) { print "$c\n"; }
   else { $c->do_something(); }
}
[download]

(Incidentally my problem is parsing an HTML::Element object)

Comment on How do you identify a reference? Download Code

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Re: How do you identify a reference? by belg4mit (Prior) on May 09, 2002 at 04:34 UTC
ref, returns some kind of true if it's a reference, specific values of truth for specific kinds of references.	[reply]
Re: How do you identify a reference? by dsb (Chaplain) on May 09, 2002 at 17:38 UTC
`use strict; my $var = "whatever"; # try different values to see what happens my $val = ref $var; my $res = $val ? "Is a Refenence: $val" : "Not a reference"; print $res, "\n";` [download] `ref` will return the type of reference(`SCALAR`,`ARRAY`,`HASH`,etc). Amel This is `my` cool `%SIG`	[reply] [d/l]