Hmm, I may not have stated my original question clearly enough. Basically, my script is going to get an object. That object could be blessed into any class (not a name of my choosing), and that object could be a blessed reference of any kind. Most of the time, that's not a problem, but apparently these two lines will produce almost exactly the same output (only addresses will differ):

my $re = qr/temp/i; bless $re, $class;
my $var = 'temp';   bless $var, $class;

Both of those objects, when looked at using ref() will be of class '$class' (in this case, say 'Temp'). Both of those objects, when looked at using scalar(), will appear as something like '$class=SCALAR(0x00000)' ($class could be 'Temp' or it could be whatever $class was; again, that's up to the object's original class). I guess my real question is, is there some other way to obtain information on that blessed value that I'm missing?