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()".

SEE ALSO

       Perl::Critic::Policy::Variables::ProtectPrivateVars

AUTHOR

       Chris Dolan <cdolan@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (c) 2006-2011 Chris Dolan.

       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.

perl v5.18.1                           Perl::Critic::Policy::Subroutines::ProtectPrivateSubs(3pm)