"that messes up the sequential token scan!"

Precisely. It's very, very hard to parse perl with perl. Some say impossible even. No matter what technique is deployed, because Perl is There Is More Than One Way To Do It, there will ALWAYS be edge cases that you won't catch.

As I said... I've spent a great number of years writing introspection type software, and no matter what approach you take, you'll always find gotchas. If what your doing is something so that you can refactor software to make it much more logical and proper (than what you have in the example above), do a pass, refactor, do another pass, refactor more until you're done, and ensure you have before and after unit tests already in place before anything's changed.

Nothing is perfect. Wait until you start coming across code where someone has subroutine declarations/definitions inside of other subroutines, or even more fun, automatically generated subroutines that are created dynamically... that's a real head scratcher.

My be all, end all advice here, is one package/class per file. It's logical to most parsing software, and it's *especially* more logical to the human reader.

In reply to Re^3: extracting subroutine names (together with their packages) via PPI by stevieb
in thread extracting subroutine names (together with their packages) via PPI by clueless newbie

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