#NAME

Perl::Critic::Policy::Subroutines::ProtectPrivateSubs - Prevent access to private subs in other packages.

#AFFILIATION

This Policy is part of the core Perl::Critic distribution.

#DESCRIPTION

By convention Perl authors (like authors in many other languages) indicate private methods and variables by inserting a leading underscore before the identifier. This policy catches attempts to access private variables from outside the package itself.

The subroutines in the POSIX package which begin with an underscore (e.g. POSIX::_POSIX_ARG_MAX) are not flagged as errors by this policy.

#CONFIGURATION

You can define what a private subroutine name looks like by specifying a regular expression for the private_name_regex option in your .perlcriticrc:

[Subroutines::ProtectPrivateSubs]
private_name_regex = _(?!_)\w+

The above example is a way of saying that subroutines that start with a double underscore are not considered to be private. (Perl::Critic, in its implementation, uses leading double underscores to indicate a distribution-private subroutine-- one that is allowed to be invoked by other Perl::Critic modules, but not by anything outside of Perl::Critic.)

You can configure additional subroutines to accept by specifying them in a space-delimited list to the allow option:

[Subroutines::ProtectPrivateSubs]
allow = FOO::_bar FOO::_baz

These are added to the default list of exemptions from this policy. Allowing a subroutine also allows the corresponding method call. So FOO::_bar in the above example allows both FOO::_bar() and FOO->_bar().

#HISTORY

This policy is inspired by a similar test in B::Lint.

#BUGS

Doesn't forbid $pkg->_foo() because it can't tell the difference between that and $self->_foo().

#AUTHOR

Chris Dolan <cdolan@cpan.org>

#COPYRIGHT

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. The full text of this license can be found in the LICENSE file included with this module.

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