Perl dynamically creating methods

Question

I've researched (google) for without success, so I turn to S.O. for help.

I seem to remember a way of coding a perl package so that if any missing methods that are called, a helper function will perform the action.

All the 'missing' methods have the same look and feel. They just need call another library with the passed in arguments, plus the name of the 'missing' method.

The class will have some concrete methods, eg. constructor and destructors.

Many thanks.

Brian Agnew · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-06 11:05:44Z

3

I think you're looking for autoloading

Normally, you can't call a subroutine that isn't defined. However, if there is a subroutine named AUTOLOAD in the undefined subroutine's package (or in the case of an object method, in the package of any of the object's base classes), then the AUTOLOAD subroutine is called with the same arguments that would have been passed to the original subroutine. You can define the AUTOLOAD subroutine to return values just like a regular subroutine, or you can make it define the routine that didn't exist and then call that as if it'd been there all along.

The function/method name called is available thus:

my $method= our $AUTOLOAD;

edited Dec 6, 2012 at 11:05

answered Dec 6, 2012 at 10:49

Brian Agnew

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3 Comments

Brian Agnew Over a year ago

See above for the function name (and the linked doc)

null Over a year ago

Thanks for the great and quick answer. Appreciated.

Brian Agnew Over a year ago

No problem. I felt your pain since I knew I'd seen the above years ago, but couldn't remember what it was called

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