What's happening with this DBI:db object when errstr is called?

Question

I'm delegating an attribute in my current class called 'dbc' as a DBIx::Connector so that I can call $self->dbc->dbh from inside methods, however I'm not really understanding some behaviors I'm seeing when calling the 'errstr' method on the DBI::db instance:

This:

eval {
    $dbh->do($sql);
};

$self->log->warn("Warning SQL error: $dbh->errstr") if ($@);

returns WARN - Warning SQL error: DBI::db=HASH(0xaf43130)->errstr

However, this works, and returns a proper error string:

eval {
        $dbh->do($sql);
    };

    if($@){
        my $errstr = $dbh->errstr;
        $self->log->warn("Warning SQL error: $errstr");
    }

What's happening here?

Answer 1

Perl doesn't interpolate method calls inside double-quoted strings. $dbh->errstr is calling a method. Try:

$self->log->warn("Warning SQL error: " . $dbh->errstr) if $@;