| perl documentation | Contained in the perl distribution. |
carp - warn of errors (from perspective of caller)
cluck - warn of errors with stack backtrace (not exported by default)
croak - die of errors (from perspective of caller)
confess - die of errors with stack backtrace
use Carp;
croak "We're outta here!";
use Carp qw(cluck);
cluck "This is how we got here!";
The Carp routines are useful in your own modules because
they act like die() or warn(), but with a message which is more
likely to be useful to a user of your module. In the case of
cluck, confess, and longmess that context is a summary of every
call in the call-stack. For a shorter message you can use carp
or croak which report the error as being from where your module
was called. There is no guarantee that that is where the error
was, but it is a good educated guess.
You can also alter the way the output and logic of Carp works, by
changing some global variables in the Carp namespace. See the
section on GLOBAL VARIABLES below.
Here is a more complete description of how carp and croak work.
What they do is search the call-stack for a function call stack where
they have not been told that there shouldn't be an error. If every
call is marked safe, they give up and give a full stack backtrace
instead. In other words they presume that the first likely looking
potential suspect is guilty. Their rules for telling whether
a call shouldn't generate errors work as follows:
Any call from a package to itself is safe.
Packages claim that there won't be errors on calls to or from
packages explicitly marked as safe by inclusion in @CARP_NOT, or
(if that array is empty) @ISA. The ability to override what
@ISA says is new in 5.8.
The trust in item 2 is transitive. If A trusts B, and B
trusts C, then A trusts C. So if you do not override @ISA
with @CARP_NOT, then this trust relationship is identical to,
"inherits from".
Any call from an internal Perl module is safe. (Nothing keeps user modules from marking themselves as internal to Perl, but this practice is discouraged.)
Any call to Perl's warning system (eg Carp itself) is safe.
(This rule is what keeps it from reporting the error at the
point where you call carp or croak.)
$Carp::CarpLevel can be set to skip a fixed number of additional
call levels. Using this is not recommended because it is very
difficult to get it to behave correctly.
As a debugging aid, you can force Carp to treat a croak as a confess and a carp as a cluck across all modules. In other words, force a detailed stack trace to be given. This can be very helpful when trying to understand why, or from where, a warning or error is being generated.
This feature is enabled by 'importing' the non-existent symbol 'verbose'. You would typically enable it by saying
perl -MCarp=verbose script.pl
or by including the string -MCarp=verbose in the PERL5OPT
environment variable.
Alternately, you can set the global variable $Carp::Verbose to true.
See the GLOBAL VARIABLES section below.
This variable determines how many characters of a string-eval are to
be shown in the output. Use a value of 0 to show all text.
Defaults to 0.
This variable determines how many characters of each argument to a
function to print. Use a value of 0 to show the full length of the
argument.
Defaults to 64.
This variable determines how many arguments to each function to show.
Use a value of 0 to show all arguments to a function call.
Defaults to 8.
This variable makes carp and croak generate stack backtraces
just like cluck and confess. This is how use Carp 'verbose'
is implemented internally.
Defaults to 0.
This variable, in your package, says which packages are not to be
considered as the location of an error. The carp() and cluck()
functions will skip over callers when reporting where an error occurred.
NB: This variable must be in the package's symbol table, thus:
# These work
our @CARP_NOT; # file scope
use vars qw(@CARP_NOT); # package scope
@My::Package::CARP_NOT = ... ; # explicit package variable
# These don't work
sub xyz { ... @CARP_NOT = ... } # w/o declarations above
my @CARP_NOT; # even at top-level
Example of use:
package My::Carping::Package;
use Carp;
our @CARP_NOT;
sub bar { .... or _error('Wrong input') }
sub _error {
# temporary control of where'ness, __PACKAGE__ is implicit
local @CARP_NOT = qw(My::Friendly::Caller);
carp(@_)
}
This would make Carp report the error as coming from a caller not
in My::Carping::Package, nor from My::Friendly::Caller.
Also read the DESCRIPTION section above, about how Carp decides
where the error is reported from.
Use @CARP_NOT, instead of $Carp::CarpLevel.
Overrides Carp's use of @ISA.
This says what packages are internal to Perl. Carp will never
report an error as being from a line in a package that is internal to
Perl. For example:
$Carp::Internal{ (__PACKAGE__) }++;
# time passes...
sub foo { ... or confess("whatever") };
would give a full stack backtrace starting from the first caller outside of __PACKAGE__. (Unless that package was also internal to Perl.)
This says which packages are internal to Perl's warning system. For
generating a full stack backtrace this is the same as being internal
to Perl, the stack backtrace will not start inside packages that are
listed in %Carp::CarpInternal. But it is slightly different for
the summary message generated by carp or croak. There errors
will not be reported on any lines that are calling packages in
%Carp::CarpInternal.
For example Carp itself is listed in %Carp::CarpInternal.
Therefore the full stack backtrace from confess will not start
inside of Carp, and the short message from calling croak is
not placed on the line where croak was called.
This variable determines how many additional call frames are to be
skipped that would not otherwise be when reporting where an error
occurred on a call to one of Carp's functions. It is fairly easy
to count these call frames on calls that generate a full stack
backtrace. However it is much harder to do this accounting for calls
that generate a short message. Usually people skip too many call
frames. If they are lucky they skip enough that Carp goes all of
the way through the call stack, realizes that something is wrong, and
then generates a full stack backtrace. If they are unlucky then the
error is reported from somewhere misleading very high in the call
stack.
Therefore it is best to avoid $Carp::CarpLevel. Instead use
@CARP_NOT, %Carp::Internal and %Carp::CarpInternal.
Defaults to 0.
The Carp routines don't handle exception objects currently. If called with a first argument that is a reference, they simply call die() or warn(), as appropriate.
| perl documentation | Contained in the perl distribution. |
package Carp; our $VERSION = '1.17'; our $MaxEvalLen = 0; our $Verbose = 0; our $CarpLevel = 0; our $MaxArgLen = 64; # How much of each argument to print. 0 = all. our $MaxArgNums = 8; # How many arguments to print. 0 = all. require Exporter; our @ISA = ('Exporter'); our @EXPORT = qw(confess croak carp); our @EXPORT_OK = qw(cluck verbose longmess shortmess); our @EXPORT_FAIL = qw(verbose); # hook to enable verbose mode # The members of %Internal are packages that are internal to perl. # Carp will not report errors from within these packages if it # can. The members of %CarpInternal are internal to Perl's warning # system. Carp will not report errors from within these packages # either, and will not report calls *to* these packages for carp and # croak. They replace $CarpLevel, which is deprecated. The # $Max(EvalLen|(Arg(Len|Nums)) variables are used to specify how the eval # text and function arguments should be formatted when printed. # disable these by default, so they can live w/o require Carp $CarpInternal{Carp}++; $CarpInternal{warnings}++; $Internal{Exporter}++; $Internal{'Exporter::Heavy'}++; # if the caller specifies verbose usage ("perl -MCarp=verbose script.pl") # then the following method will be called by the Exporter which knows # to do this thanks to @EXPORT_FAIL, above. $_[1] will contain the word # 'verbose'. sub export_fail { shift; $Verbose = shift if $_[0] eq 'verbose'; @_ } sub longmess { # Icky backwards compatibility wrapper. :-( # # The story is that the original implementation hard-coded the # number of call levels to go back, so calls to longmess were off # by one. Other code began calling longmess and expecting this # behaviour, so the replacement has to emulate that behaviour. my $call_pack = defined &{"CORE::GLOBAL::caller"} ? &{"CORE::GLOBAL::caller"}() : caller(); if ($Internal{$call_pack} or $CarpInternal{$call_pack}) { return longmess_heavy(@_); } else { local $CarpLevel = $CarpLevel + 1; return longmess_heavy(@_); } }; sub shortmess { # Icky backwards compatibility wrapper. :-( local @CARP_NOT = defined &{"CORE::GLOBAL::caller"} ? &{"CORE::GLOBAL::caller"}() : caller(); shortmess_heavy(@_); }; sub croak { die shortmess @_ } sub confess { die longmess @_ } sub carp { warn shortmess @_ } sub cluck { warn longmess @_ } sub caller_info { my $i = shift(@_) + 1; my %call_info; { package DB; @args = \$i; # A sentinal, which no-one else has the address of @call_info{ qw(pack file line sub has_args wantarray evaltext is_require) } = defined &{"CORE::GLOBAL::caller"} ? &{"CORE::GLOBAL::caller"}($i) : caller($i); } unless (defined $call_info{pack}) { return (); } my $sub_name = Carp::get_subname(\%call_info); if ($call_info{has_args}) { my @args; if (@DB::args == 1 && ref $DB::args[0] eq ref \$i && $DB::args[0] == \$i) { @DB::args = (); # Don't let anyone see the address of $i @args = "** Incomplete caller override detected; \@DB::args were not set **"; } else { @args = map {Carp::format_arg($_)} @DB::args; } if ($MaxArgNums and @args > $MaxArgNums) { # More than we want to show? $#args = $MaxArgNums; push @args, '...'; } # Push the args onto the subroutine $sub_name .= '(' . join (', ', @args) . ')'; } $call_info{sub_name} = $sub_name; return wantarray() ? %call_info : \%call_info; } # Transform an argument to a function into a string. sub format_arg { my $arg = shift; if (ref($arg)) { $arg = defined($overload::VERSION) ? overload::StrVal($arg) : "$arg"; } if (defined($arg)) { $arg =~ s/'/\\'/g; $arg = str_len_trim($arg, $MaxArgLen); # Quote it? $arg = "'$arg'" unless $arg =~ /^-?[\d.]+\z/; } else { $arg = 'undef'; } # The following handling of "control chars" is direct from # the original code - it is broken on Unicode though. # Suggestions? utf8::is_utf8($arg) or $arg =~ s/([[:cntrl:]]|[[:^ascii:]])/sprintf("\\x{%x}",ord($1))/eg; return $arg; } # Takes an inheritance cache and a package and returns # an anon hash of known inheritances and anon array of # inheritances which consequences have not been figured # for. sub get_status { my $cache = shift; my $pkg = shift; $cache->{$pkg} ||= [{$pkg => $pkg}, [trusts_directly($pkg)]]; return @{$cache->{$pkg}}; } # Takes the info from caller() and figures out the name of # the sub/require/eval sub get_subname { my $info = shift; if (defined($info->{evaltext})) { my $eval = $info->{evaltext}; if ($info->{is_require}) { return "require $eval"; } else { $eval =~ s/([\\\'])/\\$1/g; return "eval '" . str_len_trim($eval, $MaxEvalLen) . "'"; } } return ($info->{sub} eq '(eval)') ? 'eval {...}' : $info->{sub}; } # Figures out what call (from the point of view of the caller) # the long error backtrace should start at. sub long_error_loc { my $i; my $lvl = $CarpLevel; { ++$i; my $pkg = defined &{"CORE::GLOBAL::caller"} ? &{"CORE::GLOBAL::caller"}($i) : caller($i); unless(defined($pkg)) { # This *shouldn't* happen. if (%Internal) { local %Internal; $i = long_error_loc(); last; } else { # OK, now I am irritated. return 2; } } redo if $CarpInternal{$pkg}; redo unless 0 > --$lvl; redo if $Internal{$pkg}; } return $i - 1; } sub longmess_heavy { return @_ if ref($_[0]); # don't break references as exceptions my $i = long_error_loc(); return ret_backtrace($i, @_); } # Returns a full stack backtrace starting from where it is # told. sub ret_backtrace { my ($i, @error) = @_; my $mess; my $err = join '', @error; $i++; my $tid_msg = ''; if (defined &threads::tid) { my $tid = threads->tid; $tid_msg = " thread $tid" if $tid; } my %i = caller_info($i); $mess = "$err at $i{file} line $i{line}$tid_msg\n"; while (my %i = caller_info(++$i)) { $mess .= "\t$i{sub_name} called at $i{file} line $i{line}$tid_msg\n"; } return $mess; } sub ret_summary { my ($i, @error) = @_; my $err = join '', @error; $i++; my $tid_msg = ''; if (defined &threads::tid) { my $tid = threads->tid; $tid_msg = " thread $tid" if $tid; } my %i = caller_info($i); return "$err at $i{file} line $i{line}$tid_msg\n"; } sub short_error_loc { # You have to create your (hash)ref out here, rather than defaulting it # inside trusts *on a lexical*, as you want it to persist across calls. # (You can default it on $_[2], but that gets messy) my $cache = {}; my $i = 1; my $lvl = $CarpLevel; { my $called = defined &{"CORE::GLOBAL::caller"} ? &{"CORE::GLOBAL::caller"}($i) : caller($i); $i++; my $caller = defined &{"CORE::GLOBAL::caller"} ? &{"CORE::GLOBAL::caller"}($i) : caller($i); return 0 unless defined($caller); # What happened? redo if $Internal{$caller}; redo if $CarpInternal{$caller}; redo if $CarpInternal{$called}; redo if trusts($called, $caller, $cache); redo if trusts($caller, $called, $cache); redo unless 0 > --$lvl; } return $i - 1; } sub shortmess_heavy { return longmess_heavy(@_) if $Verbose; return @_ if ref($_[0]); # don't break references as exceptions my $i = short_error_loc(); if ($i) { ret_summary($i, @_); } else { longmess_heavy(@_); } } # If a string is too long, trims it with ... sub str_len_trim { my $str = shift; my $max = shift || 0; if (2 < $max and $max < length($str)) { substr($str, $max - 3) = '...'; } return $str; } # Takes two packages and an optional cache. Says whether the # first inherits from the second. # # Recursive versions of this have to work to avoid certain # possible endless loops, and when following long chains of # inheritance are less efficient. sub trusts { my $child = shift; my $parent = shift; my $cache = shift; my ($known, $partial) = get_status($cache, $child); # Figure out consequences until we have an answer while (@$partial and not exists $known->{$parent}) { my $anc = shift @$partial; next if exists $known->{$anc}; $known->{$anc}++; my ($anc_knows, $anc_partial) = get_status($cache, $anc); my @found = keys %$anc_knows; @$known{@found} = (); push @$partial, @$anc_partial; } return exists $known->{$parent}; } # Takes a package and gives a list of those trusted directly sub trusts_directly { my $class = shift; no strict 'refs'; no warnings 'once'; return @{"$class\::CARP_NOT"} ? @{"$class\::CARP_NOT"} : @{"$class\::ISA"}; } 1; __END__