[Canberra-pm] how to tell if a library is available?

[Kim Holburn]

My problem is that I want to load and use the module if it's available  
but if it's not available I want the script to fall back to other  
strategies hopefully without setting off lots of warnings.

I didn't realise that the use statement is a compile time directive.   
It obviously works at run time as in the eval but what exactly it does  
then I'm not sure.  I think from the behaviour I'm seeing that the use  
in the eval is not determined at compile time because at compile time  
it's just a string.  Therefore references to variables in the library  
are not linked at compile time unless a naked "use" or "require"  
statement appears somewhere.

If the library isn't found then -w generates all sorts of warnings  
about strange variables that haven't been declared but I like having - 
w on.

I guess what I'd like are some conditional compile directives but they  
don't exist.  It seems the line in perl between compile directives and  
runtime commands is a bit blurry.

On 2008/Jun/17, at 2:15 AM, Paul Fenwick wrote:

> G'day Kim / CPM,
>
> Kim Holburn wrote:
>
>> eval "use Text::Autoformat" ;
>> if (!$@) {
>>   use Text::Autoformat ;
>>   ....
>
> Aha!  You've been caught by the fact that "use" statements happen at  
> compile-time, and not run-time.  This means that a "use" inside an  
> if structure gets executed before perl even looks at the conditional.
>
> The string eval effectively delays loading of the module to run- 
> time, as well as capturing the error if the module can't be find.
>
> Note that the eval *will* load the module if it's available.  If  
> it's not, it sets $@ with the reason why it could not be loaded  
> (usually because it's not installed).
>
> This means your code can be written as:
>
> eval "use Text::Autoformat";
>
> if ($@) {
> 	print "Drat, Text::Autoformat not available";
> } else {
> 	print "We have Text::Autoformat loaded";
> }
>
> All of this assumes that you want to use the module if it's  
> available, which is usually the case.
>
>> If I don't have the use statement I get lots of other errors (using  
>> -w).
>
> I can only guess these are genuine warnings that relate to the rest  
> of the code, but not the specific task of loading a module.
>
> Cheerio,
>
> 	Paul
>
> -- 
> Paul Fenwick <pjf at perltraining.com.au> | http://perltraining.com.au/
> Director of Training                   | Ph:  +61 3 9354 6001
> Perl Training Australia                | Fax: +61 3 9354 2681
>

--
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.
                           -- Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Analog, Apr 1961