Due to my cursory reading in the Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition,
earlier this week, I've been investigating the use autouse pragma,
to see if it will indeed solve my issue of wanting to use different modules
based on the current situation. Unfortunately, I cannot find any
documentation on it in perldoc.
I remember seeing something about wrapping this stuff into a BEGIN
block, but that would require knowing certain information immediately, and I
might need the code to work through some steps before getting there.
Fortunately, this
node just appeared on Perl Monks today, and I got to see other ways
of doing it:
- The if module lets you do something like use if $type eq
'x', "Some::Module"; However, $type must be known at compile time
(i.e., it's based on system info or on @ARGV); this probably wouldn't
work in a web-based application.
- Use require and import instead: if $type wq 'ex')
{ require Some::Module; Some::Module->import if
Some::Module->can("import"); } If your module doesn't export
anything, you can even omit the call to import.
- Use an eval: if ($type eq 'x') { eval "use Some::Module";
} This gets around the import problem, but could possibly
run into other compile time issues.
So, basically, I already had the tools to do the job; just needed to examine
the problem more.
