Occasionally I find myself wading through a complex object to find all of the
things referenced in it that have a certain property -- all of the database
handles, say.
I'd love to have code like this
use Data::Finder; # no such module exists.
$wanted= sub {
$a = shift;
return undef unless ref $a;
return undef if (ref $a) =~ /ARRAY|CODE|HASH/ ; # look only at object
references
return $a->isa('DBI::db');
}
my @dbh_handles = Data::Finder->find($obj,$wanted);
Of course it would ba a Bad Thing to modify the arguments of &wanted
unintentionally, and
probably no real application should be doing anything like this, so maybe this
should be something like Devel::Data::Finder, because I think it would be a
useful
development aid. It would especially useful when using somebody else's
code which
hands off some complex object to a caller.
My questions are:
1) Am I out of my mind? (on this topic only, please :-)
2) Does such a beast already exist?
Thanks,
Greg
