If you change "::" to "/" and append ".pm", then you don't need a string eval, you can just do require $class. I wouldn't even do eval { require $class } (non-string eval) unless I was wanting to work around the module not being found. But if you do want to eval, then the best choice is:

( my $file= $class ) =~ s-::|'-/-g;
if(  ! eval { require "$file.pm"; 1 }  ) {
    # work-around the failure here
}
[download]

But I don't find the argument against string eval compelling enough to have much of a strong preference between that and the below string eval unless there is risk that $class might contain mischevious data:

if(  ! eval "require $class; 1"  ) {
    # work-around the failure here
}
[download]

If you don't want to work-around a failure (and trust $class), then the choices are:

eval "require $class; 1"
    or  die $@;
[download]

and

( my $file= $class ) =~ s-::|'-/-g;
require "$file.pm";
[download]

And I'd never use UNIVERSAL::require, since I consider poluting such a very global namespace to be way too much sin for the sake of saving one line of code.

The 1 is useless since require always returns true. (If it encounters no error, it returns what the module returns. If the module returns false, it encountered an error. If it encounters an error, it throws an exception.)

Yes, and the space is equally "useless" because require"$file.pm" works just fine. That doesn't mean I'm going to drop either of them.

The "; 1" is part of the best practice. It may not change the effect of this particular code, but it means I don't have to worry about whether the preceeding code might return a false value rather than dieing. It also tells the reader that I'm testing whether eval succeeded not whether the eval'd code returned a true value (which also makes it clearer why I'm using eval at all).

- tye        

It uses eval EXPR for #line to work. It has nothing to do with require. (eval BLOCK would suffice if you wanted to catch exceptions.)

The following will work (even if your platform doesn't use / as the path seperator):

$class = 'HTTP/Request.pm';
require $class;
[download]

However, transforming the class name into a path is really no better.