• NAME
• SYNOPSIS
• DESCRIPTION
• Template
• Functions
• check
• Global Variables
• $CPANPLUS::Tools::Check::VERBOSE
• $CPANPLUS::Tools::Check::STRICT_TYPE
• $CPANPLUS::Tools::Check::ALLOW_UNKNOWN
• AUTHOR
• Acknowledgements
• COPYRIGHT

NAME

CPANPLUS::Tools::Check;

SYNOPSIS

    use CPANPLUS::Tools::Check qw[check];

    sub fill_personal_info {
        my %hash = @_;

        my $tmpl = {
            firstname   => { required   => 1, },
            lastname    => { required   => 1, },
            gender      => { required   => 1,
                             allow      => [qr/M/i, qr/F/i],
                           },
            married     => { allow      => [0,1] },
            age         => { default    => 21,
                             allow      => qr/^\d+$/,
                           },
            id_list     => { default    => [],
                             strict_type => 1
                           },
            phone       => { allow      => sub {
                                                my %args = @_;
                                                return 1 if
                                                    &valid_phone(
                                                        $args{phone}
                                                    );
                                            }
                            },
            }
        };

        my $parsed_args = check( $tmpl, \%hash, $VERBOSE )
                            or die [Could not parse arguments!];

DESCRIPTION

CPANPLUS::Tools::Check is a generic input parsing/checking mechanism.

It allows you to validate input via a template. The only requirement is that the arguments must be named.

CPANPLUS::Tools::Check will do the following things for you:

• Convert all keys to lowercase

• Check if all required arguments have been provided

• Set arguments that have not been provided to the default

• Weed out arguments that are not supported and warn about them to the user

• Validate the arguments given by the user based on strings, regexes, lists or even subroutines

• Enforce type integrity if required

Most of CPANPLUS::Tools::Check's power comes from it's template, which we'll discuss below:

Template

As you can see in the synopsis, based on your template, the arguments provided will be validated.

The template can take a different set of rules per key that is used.

The following rules are available:

default

This is the default value if none was provided by the user. This is also the type strict_type will look at when checking type integrity (see below).

required

A boolean flag that indicates if this argument was a required argument. If marked as required and not provided, check() will fail.

strict_type

This does a ref() check on the argument provided. The ref of the argument must be the same as the ref of the default value for this check to pass.

This is very usefull if you insist on taking an array reference as argument for example.

allow

A set of criteria used to validate a perticular piece of data if it has to adhere to particular rules. You can use the following types of values for allow:

string

The provided argument MUST be equal to the string for the validation to pass.

array ref

The provided argument MUST equal (or match in case of a regular expression) one of the elements of the array ref for the validation to pass.

regexp

The provided argument MUST match the regular expression for the validation to pass.

subroutine

The provided subroutine MUST return true in order for the validation to pass and the argument accepted.

(This is particularly usefull for more complicated data).

Functions

check

CPANPLUS::Tools::Check only has one function, which is called check.

This function is not exported by default, so you'll have to ask for it via:

    use CPANPLUS::Tools::Check qw[check];

or use it's fully qualified name instead.

check takes a list of arguments, as follows:

Template

This is a hashreference which contains a template as explained in the synopsis.

Arguments

This is a reference to a hash of named arguments which need checking.

Verbose

A boolean to indicate whether check should be verbose and warn about whant went wrong in a check or not.

check will return undef when it fails, or a hashref with lowercase keys of parsed arguments when it succeeds.

So a typical call to check would look like this:

    my $parsed = check( \%template, \%arguments, $VERBOSE )
                    or warn q[Arguments could not be parsed!];

Global Variables

The behaviour of CPANPLUS::Tools::Check can be altered by changing the following global variables:

$CPANPLUS::Tools::Check::VERBOSE

This controls whether CPANPLUS::Check::Module will issue warnings and explenations as to why certain things may have failed. If you set it to 0, CPANPLUS::Tools::Check will not output any warnings. The default is 1;

$CPANPLUS::Tools::Check::STRICT_TYPE

This works like the strict_type option you can pass to check, which will turn on strict_type globally for all calls to check. The default is 0;

$CPANPLUS::Tools::Check::ALLOW_UNKNOWN

If you set this flag, unknown options will still be present in the return value, rather than filtered out. This is usefull if your subroutine is only interested in a few arguments, and wants to pass the rest on blindly to perhaps another subroutine. The default is 0;

AUTHOR

This module by Jos Boumans <kane@cpan.org>.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ann Barcomb for her suggestions.

COPYRIGHT

This module is copyright (c) 2002 Jos Boumans <kane@cpan.org>. All rights reserved.

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