How do I access a value of a nested Perl hash? - perl

Question

I am new to Perl and I have a problem that's very simple but I cannot find the answer when consulting my Perl book.
When printing the result of
Dumper($request);
I get the following result:
$VAR1 = bless( {
'_protocol' => 'HTTP/1.1',
'_content' => '',
'_uri' => bless( do{\(my $o = 'http://myawesomeserver.org:8081/counter/')}, 'URI::http' ),
'_headers' => bless( {
'user-agent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/20080528 Epiphany/2.22 Firefox/3.0',
'connection' => 'keep-alive',
'cache-control' => 'max-age=0',
'keep-alive' => '300',
'accept' => 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'accept-language' => 'en-us,en;q=0.5',
'accept-encoding' => 'gzip,deflate',
'host' => 'localhost:8081',
'accept-charset' => 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7'
}, 'HTTP::Headers' ),
'_method' => 'GET',
'_handle' => bless( \*Symbol::GEN0, 'FileHandle' )
}, 'HTTP::Server::Simple::Dispatched::Request' );
How can I access the values of '_method' ('GET') or of 'host' ('localhost:8081').
I know that's an easy question, but Perl is somewhat cryptic at the beginning.

Answer 1

Narthring has it right as far as the brute force method. Nested hashes are addressed by chaining the keys like so:
$hash{top_key}{next_key}{another_key}; # for %hash
# OR
$hash_ref->{top_key}{next_key}{another_key}; # for refs.
However since both of these "hashes" are blessed objects. It might help reading up on HTTP::Server::Simple::Dispatched::Request, which can tell you that it's a HTTP::Request object and looking at HTTP::Request section on the header and method methods, tells you that the following do the trick:
my $method = $request->method();
my $host = $request->header( 'host' );
Really, I recommend you get the firefox search plugin called Perldoc Module::Name and when you encounter Dumper output that says "bless ... 'Some::Module::Name'" you can just copy and paste it into the search plugin and read the documentation on CPAN.