I feel like I am banging my head against a wall with this code and was hoping someone here could shed some light on what I might be doing wrong here.

The problem is that I am using AUTOLOAD to get/set some properties of an object. However it seems that whenever I set the property to '' and then try to retrieve the object I get undef returned.

The code is below. Thanks for any help you can provide.

sub AUTOLOAD {

    my $self = shift;

    my $function = our $AUTOLOAD;
    $function =~ /::DESTROY/ && return;  #ignore the DESTROY call
    $function =~ s/.*:://;

    if(@_) {
        my $new_value = shift;
        if($new_value ne $self->{$function}) {
            $self->{$function} = $new_value;
            #mark this object as changed unless we are modifying the
            #dirty bit itself
            $self->{dirty} = 1 if $function ne 'dirty';
        }
    }

    return $self->{$function};

}
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