Interesting question! It appears that none of perlmod and the various documents it references seem to give any such restrictions; there's only The Syntax of Variable Names and Identifier parsing, the latter of which gives / (?[ ( \p{Word} & \p{XID_Start} ) + [_] ]) (?[ ( \p{Word} & \p{XID_Continue} ) ]) * /x for Unicode and / (?aa) (?!\d) \w+ /x for ASCII, and indeed, under use utf8;, package Σäೡↈ is allowed. However, when it comes to .pm files, the issue arises in the filesystem, and that's a can of worms across different OSes. (Update 2: On my Linux system, a file named Σäೡↈ.pm works fine as a regular module, I can use it normally.)

Over in this node, I mentioned several different modules that parse .pm files: cpanm uses Parse::PMFile, which borrows this code from the PAUSE indexer, and they use ([\w\:\']+) to extract package names and the following to check if module names are bad:

$package !~ /^\w[\w\:\']*\w?\z/
  || $package !~ /\w\z/
  || $package =~ /:/ && $package !~ /::/
  || $package =~ /\w:\w/
  || $package =~ /:::/

[download]

Module::Info's version and ExtUtils::MM_Unix share the regex /\w[\w\:\']*/.

But what is I suspect the "most official" answer comes from CPAN::Meta::Validator:

/^[A-Za-z0-9_]+(::[A-Za-z0-9_]+)*$/

[download]

And indeed, all of the entries in 02packages.details.txt match this pattern, the only exceptions currently being WWW::Scripter'_about_protocol and WWW::Scripter'Location, and changing :: to (?:'|::) in the above regex matches those too. Under versions of Perl that support /aa (5.14+), it can also be written /^\w+(?:(?:'|::)\w+)*$/aa.

There's an interesting caveat here: This regex allows package names that begin with digits, which is not a valid Perl identifier. Indeed, package 123; is a syntax error - but package Acme::123; is not, and the existence of e.g. Acme::123 and many others on the CPAN confirms that this appears to be allowed. (Side note: as of 5.18, any non-empty string is allowed on the LHS of ->.)

Update: All packages on the CPAN also match the slightly more restrictive /^(?!\d)\w+(?:(?:'|::)\w+)*$/aa, which also lines up with the blog post by schwern the AM linked to - and your own regex! Additional minor edits. Update 2: And of course Module::Runtime, as mentioned by the AM, agrees too.

In reply to Re: Is there an official regex for checking module names? (updated x2) by haukex
in thread Is there an official regex for checking module names? by kcott

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