It didn't seem fair (or fun) to provide a PadWalker example, and not a Filter::Simple one. I don't recommend using either of these approaches, but here is a basic(?) filter implementation: ShownameFilter.pm 
package ShownameFilter;
use Filter::Simple;

FILTER_ONLY code => sub {
    s{
    showname\(
      (                # Capture 2 (closes second)
          \s*
          \\?          # References
          [\$@%*]+     # Scalar, array, hash, glob
          (            # Capture 1 (closes first)
           \w*         # alphanumeric. Doesn't catch a lot of perl spe
+cial vars
          )            # End capture 1
          \s*
      )                # End capture 2
      \)
    }
    {showname('$2',$1)}xg;
};

1;

[download]
showname.pl 
use strict;
use warnings;
use ShownameFilter;

sub showname {
    my ($name,$value) = @_;
    print "name: $name\n";
}

my ($x, $x12, @foo, %bar);

showname($x);
showname( $x12 );
showname( \$x12 );
showname( @foo );

[download]
Output: 
name: x
name: x12
name: x12
name: foo

[download]
Again - I don't recommend doing this.

In reply to Re: Source filter or PadWalker. Both are ugly by imp
in thread How to extract the name of a variable? by Anonymous Monk

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