NAME

Module::Require

SYNOPSIS

use Module::Require qw: require_regex require_glob :;

require_regex q[DBD::.*];
require_regex qw[DBD::.* Foo::Bar_.*];
require_glob qw[DBD::* Foo::Bar_*];
walk_inc sub { m{(/|^)Bar_.*$} and return $_ }, undef, q"DBD";

DESCRIPTION

This module provides a way to load in a series of modules without having to know all the names, but just the pattern they fit. This can be useful for allowing drop-in modules for application expansion without requiring configuration or prior knowledge.

The regular expression and glob wildcards can only match the filename of the module, not the directory in which it resides. So, for example, Apache::* will load all the modules that begin with Apache::, including Apache::Session, but will not load Apache::Session::MySQL. Likewise, *::Session is not allowed since the variable part of the module name is not in the last component.

Note that unlike the Perl require keyword, quoting or leaving an argument as a bareword does not affect how the function behaves.

FUNCTIONS

walk_inc \&filter \&todo 'path'

This function will walk through @INC and pass each filename under "path::" to &filter. If &filter returns a defined value, the returned value is then passed to the &todo function. The default path is '' (the empty string). The default filter function is to return the argument. The default todo function is to load the module.

For example,

print join "\n", walk_inc;

will try to load all the available modules, printing a list of modules that could not be loaded. Note that files and directories beginning with a period (`.') are not considered.

walk_inc sub { /^X/ and return $_ }, undef, 'Foo';

will try and load all the modules in the Foo:: namespace that begin with an `X', recursively.

Module files should end with .pm and directories otherwise. This allows for an easy way to keep walk_inc from descending directories. The filter function may also be used to transform module names.

If the module is already in %INC it will be passed over.

require_regex

This function takes a list of files and searches @INC trying to find all possible modules. Only the last part of the module name should be the regex expression (Foo::Bar_.* is allowed, but F.*::Bar is not). Each file found and successfully loaded is added to %INC. Any file already in %INC is not loaded. No import functions are called.

The function will return a list of files found but not loaded or, in a scalar context, the number of such files. This is the opposite of the sense of require, with true meaning at least one file failed to load.

require_glob

This function behaves the same as the require_regex function except it uses the glob operator (<>) instead of regular expressions.

SEE ALSO

perldoc -f require.

AUTHOR

James G. Smith <jsmith@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2001 Texas A&M University. All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.