Clone - recursively copy Perl datatypes

Ray Finch "<rdf@cpan.org>" Breno G. de Oliveira "<garu@cpan.org>", Nicolas Rochelemagne "<atoomic@cpan.org>" and Florian Ragwitz "<rafl@debian.org>" perform routine maintenance releases since 2012. perl v5.40.0 2024-08-29 Clone(3pm)

Copyright 2001-2022 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.

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) };

Clone - recursively copy Perl datatypes

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.

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;