NAME

       IO::Detect - is this a frickin' filehandle or what?!

SYNOPSIS

               use IO::Detect;

               if (is_filehandle $fh)
               {
                       my $line = <$fh>;
               }

DESCRIPTION

       It is stupidly complicated to detect whether a given scalar is a filehandle (or something
       filehandle like) in Perl. This module attempts to do so, but probably falls short in some
       cases. The primary advantage of using this module is that it gives you somebody to blame
       (me) if your code can't detect a filehandle.

       The main use case for IO::Detect is for when you are writing functions and you want to
       allow the caller to pass a file as an argument without being fussy as to whether they pass
       a file name or a file handle.

   Functions
       Each function takes a single argument, or if called with no argument, operates on $_.

       "is_filehandle $thing"
           Theoretically returns true if and only if $thing is a file handle, or may be treated
           as a filehandle. That includes blessed references to filehandles, things that inherit
           from IO::Handle, etc.

           It's never going to work 100%. What Perl allows you to use as a filehandle is
           mysterious and somewhat context-dependent, as the following code illustrates.

                   my $fh = "STD" . "OUT";
                   print $fh "Hello World!\n";

       "is_filename $thing"
           Returns true if $thing is a IO::All object or Path::Class::Entity or "any non-
           reference, non-zero-length string with no line breaks".  That's because depending on
           your operating system, virtually anything can be used as a filename. (In fact, on many
           systems, including Linux, filenames can contain line breaks. However, this is unlikely
           to be intentional.)

           This function doesn't tell you whether $thing is an existing file on your system. It
           attempts to tell you whether $thing could possibly be a filename on some system
           somewhere.

       "is_fileuri $thing"
           Returns true if $thing is a URI beginning with "file://". It allows for URI objects,
           RDF::Trine::Node::Resource objects, strings and objects that overload stringification.

           This function actually returns an "interesting value of true". The value returned is a
           URI::file object.

       "as_filehandle $thing, $mode"
           Returns $thing if it is a filehandle; otherwise opens it with mode $mode (croaking if
           it cannot be opened). $mode defaults to "<" (read access).

           This function is not exported by default, but needs to be requested explicitly:

                   use IO::Detect qw(as_filehandle);

           You may even specify a different default mode, or import it several times with
           different names:

                   use IO::Detect
                     as_filehandle => { -as => 'as_filehandle_read',  mode => '<' },
                     as_filehandle => { -as => 'as_filehandle_write', mode => '>' };

   Smart Matching
       You can import three constants for use in smart matching:

               use IO::Detect -smartmatch;

       These constants are:

       "FileHandle"
       "FileName"
       "FileUri"

       They can be used like this:

               if ($file ~~ FileHandle)
               {
                       ...
               }

       Note that there does exist a FileHandle package in Perl core. This module attempts to do
       the right thing so that "FileHandle->new" still works, but there are conceivably places
       this could go wrong, or be plain old confusing.

       Although "is_filehandle" and its friends support Perl 5.8 and above, smart match is only
       available in Perl 5.10 onwards.

   Use with Scalar::Does
       The smart match constants can also be used with Scalar::Does:

               if (does $file, FileHandle)
               {
                       ...;
               }
               elsif (does $file, FileName)
               {
                       ...;
               }

   Precedence
       Because there is some overlap/ambiguity between what is a filehandle and what is a
       filename, etc, if you need to detect between them, I recommend checking "is_filehandle"
       first, then "is_fileuri" and falling back to "is_filename".

               for ($file)
               {
                       when (FileHandle)  { ... }
                       when (FileUri)     { ... }
                       when (FileName)    { ... }
                       default            { die "$file is not a file!" }
               }

   Export
       Like Scalar::Does, IO::Detect plays some tricks with namespace::clean to ensure that any
       functions it exports to your namespace are cleaned up when you're finished with them.

       Duck Typing

       In some cases you might be happy to accept something less than a complete file handle. In
       this case you can import a customised "duck type" test...

               use IO::Detect
                       -default,
                       ducktype => {
                               -as     => 'is_slurpable',
                               methods => [qw(getlines close)],
                       };

               sub do_something_with_a_file
               {
                       my $f = shift;
                       if ( is_filehandle $f or is_slurpable $f )
                               { ... }
                       elsif ( is_filename $f )
                               { ... }
               }

       Duck type test functions only test that the argument is blessed and can do all of the
       specified methods. They don't test any other aspect of "filehandliness".

BUGS

       Please report any bugs to <http://rt.cpan.org/Dist/Display.html?Queue=IO-Detect>.

SEE ALSO

       This module is an attempt to capture some of the wisdom from this PerlMonks thread
       <http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=980665> into executable code.

       Various other modules that may be of interest, in no particular order...  Scalar::Does,
       Scalar::Util, FileHandle, IO::Handle, IO::Handle::Util, IO::All, Path::Class, URI::file.

AUTHOR

       Toby Inkster <tobyink@cpan.org>.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

       This software is copyright (c) 2012-2014 by Toby Inkster.

       This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as
       the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES

       THIS PACKAGE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING,
       WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
       PURPOSE.