Perl Cookbook

Defining a Module’s Interface

Problem

You want the standard Exporter module to define the external interface to your module.

Solution

In module file YourModule.pm, place the following code. Fill in the ellipses as explained in the Discussion section.

package YourModule;
use strict;
use vars qw(@ISA @EXPORT @EXPORT_OK %EXPORT_TAGS $VERSION);

use Exporter;
$VERSION = 1.00;              # Or higher
@ISA = qw(Exporter);

@EXPORT      = qw(...);       # Symbols to autoexport (:DEFAULT tag)
@EXPORT_OK   = qw(...);       # Symbols to export on request
%EXPORT_TAGS = (              # Define names for sets of symbols
    TAG1 => [...],
    TAG2 => [...],
    ...
);

########################
# your code goes here
########################

1;                            # this should be your last line

In other files where you want to use YourModule, choose one of these lines:

use YourModule;               # Import default symbols into my package.
use YourModule qw(...);       # Import listed symbols into my package.
use YourModule ();            # Do not import any symbols
use YourModule qw(:TAG1);     # Import whole tag set

Discussion

The standard Exporter module handles the module’s external interface. Although you could define your own import method for your package, almost no one does this.

When someone says use YourModule, this does a require "YourModule.pm" statement followed a YourModule->import() method call, both during compile time. The import method inherited from the Exporter package looks for global variables in your package to govern its behavior. Because they must be package globals, we’ve declared them ...