Phoenix.pm: has a sub been defined

Beaves at aol.com Beaves at aol.com
Thu Jan 20 00:46:51 CST 2000


Do yous guys remember a while back when I had the need to determine where a 
subroutine was defined or not?  We talked a bit about the Perl symbol tables, 
etc at one of the PM meetings.  Well, can't say if the issue was ever 
resolved, but I finally found an easy solution.  It was all staring me right 
in the face on page 281 of your pew bibles (The Camel Book).

I looked at this code before, but for some reason didn't think that the 
statement 
'defined &sym' would work because I thought it would run the subroutine.  
Well, it doesn't...

I modified it somewhat to also take into account the package from which 
&is_sub was called, or to force the package an optional second argument.

sub is_sub {
    my $symname = shift;
    my $package = shift || ${[caller(0)]}[0];
    local *sym = *{"$package\::$symname"};
    return 1 if defined &sym
}

### Things can always be improved.
### After thinking about it, I realized I could test for a specific type

sub defined_in_symtable {
    my $symname = shift;
    my $package = shift || ${[caller(0)]}[0];
    my $type = shift || 'CODE';  # why not default to what started this 
crap...
    local *sym = *{"$package\::$symname"};
    if ($type eq 'CODE')  { return defined *sym{'CODE'}  }
# for some reason, the SCALAR one has to be de-referenced...
    elsif ($type eq 'SCALAR')  { return defined ${*sym{'SCALAR'}}  }
    elsif ($type eq 'HASH')  { return defined *sym{'HASH'}  }
    elsif ($type eq 'ARRAY')  { return defined *sym{'ARRAY'}  }
    elsif ($type eq 'FILEHANDLE')  { return defined *sym{'FILEHANDLE'}  }
}

This code above has not been extensively tested, but initial indications are 
that it works as expected.

I hope this may partially demystify Perl symbol tables.  I still don't feel 
like I know them that well, but I'm constantly adding stuff into my bag o' 
experience...

If anyone has any questions about this code, let's get a little discussion 
going, and liven things up a little.

Tim



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