How do I dereference Data::Dumper output?

Question

I always forget how to do this.
I have this Perl code:

print Dumper($obj);

Here is my Data::Dumper output:

$VAR1 = {
          'classname' => 'Template',
          'oid' => 2,
          'pid' => '50'
        };

But when I do something like ...

print LOGGER "classname is [\n". $obj{'classname'} . "]\n";

... I get this error ...

Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at

what am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

You should have used $obj->{'classname'} . Without the arrow, $obj{'classname'} accesses the %obj hash instead of the hashref in $obj .

This is the sort of error that gets caught by use strict; so your real error is not doing that.