Manpages - Clone.3pm

Clone - recursively copy Perl datatypes

use Clone clone; my $data = { set => [ 1 .. 50 ], foo => { answer => 42, object => SomeObject->new, }, }; my $cloned_data = clone($data); $cloned_data->{foo}{answer} = 1; print $cloned_data->{foo}{answer}; # 1 print $data->{foo}{answer}; # 42

You can also add it to your class:

package Foo; use parent Clone; sub new { bless {}, shift } package main; my $obj = Foo->new; my $copy = $obj->clone;

This module provides a clone() method which makes recursive copies of nested hash, array, scalar and reference types, including tied variables and objects.

clone() takes a scalar argument and duplicates it. To duplicate lists, arrays or hashes, pass them in by reference, e.g.

my $copy = clone (\@array); # or my %copy = %{ clone (\%hash) };

Storable’s dclone() is a flexible solution for cloning variables, albeit slower for average-sized data structures. Simple and naive benchmarks show that Clone is faster for data structures with 3 or fewer levels, while dclone() can be faster for structures 4 or more levels deep.

Copyright 2001-2019 Ray Finch. All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

Ray Finch <rdf@cpan.org>

Breno G. de Oliveira <garu@cpan.org> and Florian Ragwitz <rafl@debian.org> perform routine maintenance releases since 2012.