Conditional including of a module

edwardo_ has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello all,
need to use excel modules only if a user actually requested for that via command line switch..
On some hosts excel isn't installed, hence just putting "use Win32::OLE" and friends results in error whenever the script is invoked with whatever arguments, and I'd like to supress this.
So I asked on CB and someone advised to do the following:
use if ($excel_requested), "Win32::OLE";

which has worked in a way - it stopped producing complaints on a hosts without excel; however then it died on hosts with excel installed, complaining that it's not.

Any other suggestions?

Versions: v5.10.0, WinXP various SPs (the one with excel) and Win Server EE 2003 SP2 (the one without).
On the host without excel the script is ran as .exe, produced by PAR Packager 0.982 .

Thanks for your time..

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Re: Conditional including of a module by roubi (Hermit) on May 14, 2009 at 02:21 UTC
Have you tried this? `if ($excel_requested){ require Win32::OLE; }` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Conditional including of a module by edwardo_ (Initiate) on May 14, 2009 at 23:37 UTC
Thanks for all who responded, apologies, could not posted earlier. The above suggestion worked only when I removed requirement for Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Excel' , which I used earlier and thought I need. Apparently in this case writing to excel worked without that addition, when earlier for some reason it couldn't. Thanks again.	[reply]
Re: Conditional including of a module by lakshmananindia (Chaplain) on May 14, 2009 at 02:42 UTC
You can suppress the error by using eval `eval 'use Win32::OLE'; if($@) { #Do nothing. }` [download] --Lakshmanan G. The great pleasure in my life is doing what people say you cannot do.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Conditional including of a module by doug (Pilgrim) on May 14, 2009 at 19:39 UTC
I've done this several times for several different reasons. Your main issue is that the use statement is interpreted as soon as the ; is hit. What I've done has been a variation of `if ( $need_library ) { eval "use THE_LIBRARY_IN_QUESTION;"; die $@ if ( $@ ); }` [download] or something close to that. I think I once populated a list with needed libraries and looped through the list to load (use) them. -- doug	[reply] [d/l]