Accessing ARRAYS inside objects

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

I'm trying to assign an existing array to an object member variable whose type is array. This should be possible, but I cant figure out how. I will also need to extract the entire array (I know how to get an individual item by indexing). Here is sample code for what I'm trying to do - of course, this code does not produce the desired result(6):

use Class::Struct qw(struct);
struct S=>[a=>'$',b=>'@']; #"b" is an array
my $a=S->new;
my @q=(4,6,7,99); # A local array 

$a->b(@q);        # What I'd like to do - gives syntax err
print  $a->b(1) # Prints NOTHING .. hoping to see "6"
$a->b($q);       # Try to assign the $$q to $a->b
print  $a->b(2) # Prints NOTHING .. hoping to see "7"

# Would also like to do 
my @x = $a->b; % Extract entire array
[download]

I guess I'm looking for a overloaded method "b" that accepts an array parameter. I know that $a->b($scalar,$scalar) works fine.

How should I do this ???

Edited 2003-02-28 by Ovid

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Re: Accessing ARRAYS inside objects by xmath (Hermit) on Feb 28, 2003 at 19:15 UTC
The documentation of Class::Struct says that `$a->b` in this case returns an array reference, so you can do: `@{$a->b} = @q;` [download] and `@x = @{$a->b};` [download] see documetation like perlreftut, perllol, and perlref for more details Update: just wanted to note you should realize that these statements really copy the elements from one array to the other. It's often more efficient to pass array references around instead; see the docs I linked to.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Accessing ARRAYS inside objects by Dasaan (Beadle) on Jun 13, 2004 at 01:04 UTC
Very helpful. I spent far too long trying to work this out myself.	[reply]
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