I feel like this is a very simple question, but I can't seem to find the answer.

I'm trying to create a new class. Most of my accessors are dynamically generated with AUTOLOAD, but I have a few that need to verify data instead of blindly accepting it. Take this code as example:

sub new {
        my $class = shift;
        my %args = @_;
        my %hash = (
                _foo    => 0,
                _bar    => 0,
                _baz    => 0,
        );

        my $self = bless( \%hash, $class );

        ...

        return $self;
}

sub AUTOLOAD {
        # do stuff to auto-generate accessors for anything in my %hash
+ (except without preceding underscore), so "foo" and "bar"
}

sub baz {
        # actually verify input data here
}

[download]

Now, where my "..." is in the new method, I was doing something like this:

        foreach ( keys %args ) {
                if( exists $hash{ '_' . $_ } ) {
                        $self->{ $_ } = $args{ $_ };
                }
        }

[download]

So if I called my new as This::Object->new( bar=>7, baz=>9 );, this would just put each value into my object. But, obviously, I want to actually verify this data, so what I really want to do is call the appropriate accessor method, but I can't seem to figure out how. So, in this example, the 'new' method would do something like call $self->bar( 7 ) and $self->baz( 9 )

Can somebody please point me to the appropriate documentation for this? It almost certainly has to be very common-place in class creation. Thanks in advance for the help!

    -Bryan

In reply to Calling arbitrary method from new by mrborisguy

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