Others have already pointed out how you can use the metaobject protocol to clone objects with Moose. If you know that the object in question is a Moose object, this is a reasonable solution. I want to mention my module Object::Util though. It contains a bunch of utility methods which can be used with Moose objects and other objects too.

use Object::Util;

my $cloned_object = $existing_object->$_clone(%extra_parameters);

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Object::Util will first check if the existing object has a clone method, and if so, will just call that. After that, it falls back to using the metaobject protocol if it detects the object is Moose- or Mouse-based. Finally as a last resort, if the object is a blessed hashref, it simply does a shallow copy of the hashref and blesses the new hashref.

Object::Util has a bunch of other cool things too, like:

$cloned_object->$_extend({
  my_new_method => sub {
    my $self = shift;
    print "yay!\n";
  },
});

$cloned_object->my_new_method();  # says "yay!"

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Note that the methods provided by Object::Util are coderefs in scalar variables, so you call $object->$_method() instead of $object->method(). This is a way to make the methods available for all objects of all classes without polluting UNIVERSAL.

toby döt ink

In reply to Re: Moose 'clone' Constructor by tobyink
in thread Moose 'clone' Constructor by kcott

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