Fellow monks,

Having used __DATA__ at the bottom of scripts for a while, I'm a bit frustrated. Instead of reading the <DATA> filehandle in the main:: package, I am wanting to read it in the current package (in this case package States, but I'm struggling with having it read even a single line of __DATA__.

While searching for information on this topic, I often came across code snipplets that read from this special filehandle in other packages. I'm not planning on changing the data anytime soon, so I'd rather just read it from the bottom of my object declaration.

Here is what I have so far:

######################## FILE 1 #######################
use strict;
use warnings;
use States;

my $s = States->new();   

######################## FILE 2 #######################
package States;

use CGI qw(:standard);
use strict;
use warnings;
use Switch;
use diagnostics;

sub new {
   my ($class) = @_;

   print "Hello\n";

   my @states;
   while (<DATA>) {          
      chomp;
      print "$_\n"; # only for debugging purposes
                    # prints nothing currently

      my ($code, $abbr, $proper, $state) = split /\t+/;

      push @states, {
         CODE   => $code,
         ABBR   => $abbr,
         PROPER => $proper,
         STATE  => $state,
      }
   }

   return bless \@states;
}

1;


__DATA__
01      AL      1       Alabama
50      AK      1       Alaska
02      AZ      1       Arizona
03      AR      1       Arkansas
04      CA      1       California
05      CO      1       Colorado
06      CT      1       Connecticut
07      DE      1       Delaware
[download]

I'm using v5.8.0 on Solaris 9. The output is the following (printed from the constructor, only for debugging reasons):

Hello
[download]

Any thoughts?