Converting something to a string is mostly a one-way road.

You can only interchangeably use a string as a number or a string. There is no (sane) way to convert a string back to a reference in Perl.

The process of converting something to a string is called "stringification" in Perl. I'm not sure what you mean by "how does that happen" - I could explain to you how Perl constructs a string in which you use variables, or I could guess about how you wrote code that did that, but I'm not sure that any of these would give you the information you really seek.

In reply to Re^3: Archive::Zip: Passing members to subroutines by Corion
in thread Archive::Zip: Passing members to subroutines by stephen.baldwin

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.