In general, you don't have to worry about that. As long as you hold a reference, the object will be kept alive. But you called a function which frees the tree including all of its nodes, which it does by hollowing out any existing references to its nodes.

In reply to Re^3: Passing a list as a subroutine's return value ( list of HTML::Element objects ) by ikegami
in thread Passing a list as a subroutine's return value ( list of HTML::Element objects ) by mldvx4

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