[SOLVED] Perl Mason2 passing arrays and hashes

Perl Mason2 passing arrays and hashes

I'm trying to use Mason2 with Dancer and trivial cases like passing string to the template are working fine:

get '/foo', sub {
    template 'foo' => {
        title => 'bar'
    };
  };
    <%args>
    $.title
    </%args>
    <h1><% $.title %></h1>

So, this is working. Troubles started when I wanted to pass things like hashes or arrays to the template. And when I pass this array to the template:

template 'index', {  cats=> [{id=>1,title=>'Cat1'},{id=>2,title=>'Cat2'}]};

And set args in the template to

<%args>
$.cats
</%args>

I cannot loop through this array like this:

<ul>
% foreach my $cat ($.cats){
<li><% $cat %></li>
% } 
</ul>

$cat object is the same as $.cats object, an array. I'm not sure what I did wrong.

Thanks.

Solution

Borodin is exactly right. $.cats is an array reference; to loop through the elements, you have to dereference it:

<%args>
$.cats
</%args>

<ul>
% foreach my $cat ( @{$.cats} ) {
  <li><% $cat->{title} %></li>
% }
</ul>

Output:

<ul>
  <li>Cat1</li>
  <li>Cat2</li>
</ul>

Note that <% $cat %> evaluates $cat in scalar context and outputs it; since $cat is a hash reference, this will output something like HASH(0x4b9fad8). To output items from the hash, you have to access them by key, e.g. <% $cat->{id} %>.