I've run into a situation (while logging various data changes) where I need to determine if a reference has a valid string coercion (e.g. can properly be printed into a log or stored in a database). There isn't anything in Scalar::Util to do this, so I have cobbled together something using other methods in that library:

use strict;
use warnings;

use Scalar::Util qw(reftype refaddr);

sub has_string_coercion
{
    my $value = shift;

    my $as_string = "$value";
    my $ref = ref $value;
    my $reftype = reftype $value;
    my $refaddr = sprintf "0x%x", refaddr $value;

    if ($ref eq $reftype)
    {
        # base-type references stringify as REF(0xADDR)
        return $as_string !~ /^${ref}\(${refaddr}\)$/;
    }
    else
    {
        # blessed objects stringify as REF=REFTYPE(0xADDR)
        return $as_string !~ /^${ref}=${reftype}\(${refaddr}\)$/;
    }
}

# Example:
use DateTime;
my $ref1 = DateTime->now;
my $ref2 = \'foo';

print "DateTime has coercion: " . has_string_coercion($ref1) . "\n\n";
print "scalar ref has coercion: " . has_string_coercion($ref2) . "\n";

However, I suspect there might be a better way of determining this by inspecting the guts of the variable in some way. How can this be done better?