If you change "::" to "/" and append ".pm", then you don't need a string eval, you can just do require $class. I wouldn't even do eval { require $class } (non-string eval) unless I was wanting to work around the module not being found. But if you do want to eval, then the best choice is:

( my $file= $class ) =~ s-::|'-/-g;
if(  ! eval { require "$file.pm"; 1 }  ) {
    # work-around the failure here
}
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But I don't find the argument against string eval compelling enough to have much of a strong preference between that and the below string eval unless there is risk that $class might contain mischevious data:

if(  ! eval "require $class; 1"  ) {
    # work-around the failure here
}
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If you don't want to work-around a failure (and trust $class), then the choices are:

eval "require $class; 1"
    or  die $@;
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and

( my $file= $class ) =~ s-::|'-/-g;
require "$file.pm";
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And I'd never use UNIVERSAL::require, since I consider poluting such a very global namespace to be way too much sin for the sake of saving one line of code.

The 1 is useless since require always returns true. (If it encounters no error, it returns what the module returns. If the module returns false, it encountered an error. If it encounters an error, it throws an exception.)

It uses eval EXPR for #line to work. It has nothing to do with require. (eval BLOCK would suffice if you wanted to catch exceptions.)

The following will work (even if your platform doesn't use / as the path seperator):

$class = 'HTTP/Request.pm';
require $class;
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However, transforming the class name into a path is really no better.