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

I have MyModule.pm, which would like to know what's inside MyModule/Plugins/, or.. MyModule::Plugins::

How do I do this?

Obviously, the idea is to automatically load plugins available for this program. So that I can code MyModule::Plugin::Banana in a package apart, and if it's installed, it will be used by MyModule.

Should I do this with find (via the filesystem)? It seems brute to do that..

  • Comment on How to see what is available in Module::Namespace::*

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Re: How to see what is available in Module::Namespace::*
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Sep 21, 2009 at 18:50 UTC
Re: How to see what is available in Module::Namespace::*
by Joost (Canon) on Sep 21, 2009 at 18:42 UTC
    So, basically, to load every available module matching /MyModule::Plugins::\w+/ you can do:

    for (@INC) { my $path = "$_/MyModule/Plugins"; for my $m (<$path/*.pm>) { $m =~ s{^\Q$_\E/}{}; # strip off everything leading up to MyModul +e... $m =~ s{/}{::}g; # replace / with :: $m =~ s{\.pm$}{}; # remove extension eval "use $m;"; # use MyModule::Plugin::Whatever die if $@; # propagate exceptions } }
    updated: fixed glob

      That only searches one of @INC's directories, and it has portability issues. Fix:

      use Path::Class qw( dir ); use Scalar::Util qw( reftype ); my $base_pkg = __PACKAGE__ . '::Plugins'; my %plugins; my @subdirs = split(/::/, $base_pkg); for (@INC) { next if reftype($_); ++$plugins{"{$base_pkg}::$_"} for grep /^\.pm\z/, map $_->basename(), grep !$_->is_dir(), dir($_, @subdirs)->children(); } ( my $base_dir = $base_pkg ) =~ s{::}{/}g; ++$plugins{"{$base_pkg}::$_"} for map m{^\Q$base_dir\E/([^/]+)\.pm\z}, keys(%INC); my @plugins = sort keys(%plugins); # Load them all! for my $plugin (@plugins) { eval("require \E$plugin\Q") or die("Loading plugin $plugin: $@"); }

      You gotta be careful that the file name case matches the package name case on case-agnostic systems. You've got a problem if there's a caseless system out there. Maybe some heuristics would help (such as scanning the .pm for a matching package statement and use its case).

      Scanning %INC is useful for getting around the problem of a package manager creating a virtual file system using a reference in @INC.