Symbol

NAME

Symbol - manipulate Perl symbols and their names

SYNOPSIS

use Symbol; $sym = gensym; open($sym, "filename"); $_ = <$sym>; # etc. ungensym $sym; # no effect print qualify("x"), "\n"; # "Test::x" print qualify("x", "FOO"), "\n" # "FOO::x" print qualify("BAR::x"), "\n"; # "BAR::x" print qualify("BAR::x", "FOO"), "\n"; # "BAR::x" print qualify("STDOUT", "FOO"), "\n"; # "main::STDOUT" (global) print qualify(\*x), "\n"; # returns \*x print qualify(\*x, "FOO"), "\n"; # returns \*x

DESCRIPTION

Symbol::gensym creates an anonymous glob and returns a reference to it. Such a glob reference can be used as a file or directory handle.

For backward compatibility with older implementations that didn't support anonymous globs, Symbol::ungensym is also provided. But it doesn't do anything.

Symbol::qualify turns unqualified symbol names into qualified variable names (e.g. ``myvar'' -> ``MyPackage::myvar''). If it is given a second parameter, qualify uses it as the default package; otherwise, it uses the package of its caller. Regardless, global variable names (e.g. ``STDOUT'', ``ENV'', ``SIG'') are always qualfied with ``main::''.

Qualification applies only to symbol names (strings). References are left unchanged under the assumption that they are glob references, which are qualified by their nature.