NAME

Data::Compare - compare perl data structures

SYNOPSIS

use Data::Compare;

my $h = { 'foo' => [ 'bar', 'baz' ], 'FOO' => [ 'one', 'two' ] };
my @a1 = ('one', 'two');
my @a2 = ('bar', 'baz');
my %v = ( 'FOO', \@a1, 'foo', \@a2 );

# simple procedural interface
print 'structures of $h and \%v are ',
  Compare($h, \%v) ? "" : "not ", "identical.\n";

# OO usage
my $c = new Data::Compare($h, \%v);
print 'structures of $h and \%v are ',
  $c->Cmp ? "" : "not ", "identical.\n";
# or
my $c = new Data::Compare;
print 'structures of $h and \%v are ',
  $c->Cmp($h, \%v) ? "" : "not ", "identical.\n";

DESCRIPTION

Compare two perl data structures recursively. Returns 0 if the structures differ, else returns 1.

Note that Scalar::Properties objects are a special case. If you compare a scalar and a Scalar::Properties, then they will be considered the same if the two values are the same, regardless of the presence of properties. If you compare two Scalar::Properties objects, then they will only be considered the same if the values and the properties match.

BUGS

Data::Compare cheats with REF, CODE and GLOB references. If such a reference is encountered in a structure being processed, the result is 0 unless references are equal.

Currently, there is no way to compare two compiled piece of code with perl so there is no hope to add a better CODE references support in Data::Compare in a near future.

AUTHOR

Fabien Tassin fta@sofaraway.org

Copyright (c) 1999-2001 Fabien Tassin. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

David Cantrell david@cantrell.org.uk

Seeing that Fabien seems to have disappeared, David Cantrell has become a co-maintainer so he can apply needed patches. The licence, of course, remains the same, and all communications about this module should be CCed to Fabien in case he ever returns and wants his baby back.

SEE ALSO

perl(1), perlref(1)