Hi everyone,

I've been looking through CPAN trying to find some examples of a Perl module that does this, but I haven't come across one that seems like a fit for my specific application. Basically, I'm writing a module that will read a file, slurp in it's contents, parse through the contents until it finds a FILETYPE, load a module based on the FILETYPE, and then continue processing the rest of the file. The end goal is to return a data structure ($self) that contains the important parts of the file (important parts are identified by regexs).

The files I'm reading look something like this:

...A couple of header lines...

FILETYPE=XXXXXX

...The useful information I'm after...

[download]

The module I've created thus far looks like this:

package My::Package;
use strict;
use warnings;

...other module stuff...

sub read_slurp {

   # "worst-case-scenario" way of splitting up the 
   # file into its separate lines

   foreach ( split /(?:\015{1,2}\012|\015|\012)/, shift ) {

      # Skip comments
      if ( /^(?:\#|\!|$)/ ) {
         next;
      }

      ######################################
      # Parse the Filetype info
      ######################################
      if ( /^FILETYPE=(.*)\s*$/ ) {
         $self->{'FILETYPE'} = "$1";
         next;
      }

      ... LOAD THE APPROPRIATE MODULE ...
      ...     AND CONTINUE PARSING    ...

[download]

The individual modules to be loaded would be lists of if/then regexs that would identify info and save it to the data structure like so:

      ######################################
      # Parse the blockname
      ######################################
      if ( /^blockname\s+(.*)\s*$/ ) {
         $self->{'blockname'} = "$1";
         next;
      }

      ######################################
      # Parse the list info
      ######################################
      if ( /^list\s+(\d+)\s+(.*)\s*$/ ) {
         $self->{'list'}->{"$1"}->{"$3"} = "$2";
         next;
      }

      ...ETC ETC ETC...

[download]

Any suggestions of places to look or other modules that do something similar? I've been looking over the source code of tons of other modules (a useful exercise anyway) but I figured having some external input from experts wouldn't hurt.

Cheers and thanks!

In reply to Writing a Perl module that dynamically loads other modules by mgad

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