Perl object, toString output from within module

Question

I'm doing a class assignment to learn about Object Oriented programming in Perl. I've got a real basic class that looks like this.

sub new{
  my $class = shift;
  my $self = {
    'Sides' => 3,
    'SL' => \@sidelengths};
  bless $self, $class;
  return $self;
  }

I've got two modules to change the sides and length(can't figure out how to modify the sidelegnths with an accessor though) but I have a requirement for my work that I have a method like this

"a method: toString() which returns all of the file attributes in a printable string. If this is done correctly, the PERL

print $file->toString() . "\n";

should print a readable summary of the file."

I already think I want to use Data::Dumper to do this and that works within a script but it sounds like I need to use it within a module and call that to print a string of whats in the object. So far I have this

sub toString{
  my $self = @_;
  Dumper( $self );
  }

Which just prints out "$VAR1 = 1"

Answer 1

What you want here is to shift an argument out of @_.

sub toString {
  my $self = shift @_;  
  Dumper( $self );
}

When you have $var = @array, that evaluates the array in a scalar context, and that returns the number of elements in the array. So, your statement my $self = @_; set $self to the number of arguments passed to toString, which in this case was 1. (The $self argument.)

Alternately, you can capture the first element of @_ this way:

sub toString {
  my ($self) = @_;  
  Dumper( $self );
}

What this does is evaluate @_ in list context since it uses list assignment. It assigns the first element of @_ to $self.