Well, only you can know what it means for two of your objects to be "equal", so the best way would be for you to implement a compare method within the object that would compare the attributes of the object with a different object. You could then do something like this:

if ($obj1->compare($obj2)) {
  # ...
}
[download]

Another nice touch would be to use overload to redefine the == or eq operators like this:

use overload '==' => \&compare;
[download]

You can then write code like this:

if ($obj1 == $obj2) {
  # ...
}
[download]

But it's still your compare method that is actually being called.

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

I understand and we may implement it as proposed (have never overloaded
in Perl before :-), but what I wanted was to get the reference back from the
string that describes it, I know I may be missing something.
Is it possible to backtrack in this way, or is the conversion conducted
by the interpolation irreversible?

Thanks,
me

---Strange Currencies

OK. I think I understand now. Your problem is that somewhere along the line you have "stringified" your object and turned the reference into a string. There's no way (that I know of) to undo this, so you'll need to find out where the stringification takes place and fix that piece of code. You're looking for somewhere where the reference is quoted unnecessarily.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

Would I be correct in guessing that your stringified reference comes out of a hash key? If so, you may want to have a look at Tie::RefHash. Otherwise, just create a hash table mapping pointer strings back to their original objects, as tye suggests.

If, however, by resurrecting, you mean reclaiming an object that was deleted by garbage collection (ie. refcount went to 0), this would be a very dangerous and unwise thing do, for reasons that are fairly obvious.

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print

This works:

my %grave;
sub bury {
    my( $object )= @_;
    $grave{$obj}= $object;
}
sub resurrect {
    my( $string )= @_;
    return delete $grave{$string};
}
[download]

Now, if you want to resurrect an object that you haven't cached beforehand, then, no, that isn't supported. For one thing, when you turn your object into a string, the string doesn't hold a reference to the object so the object will be destroyed if there isn't some reference to it elsewhere.