CORE - Namespace for Perl's core routines
The CORE
namespace gives access to the original built-in functions of
Perl. The CORE
package is built into
Perl, and therefore you do not need to use or
require a hypothetical "CORE" module prior to accessing routines in this
namespace.
A list of the built-in functions in Perl can be found in perlfunc.
For all Perl keywords, a CORE::
prefix will force the built-in function
to be used, even if it has been overridden or would normally require the
feature pragma. Despite appearances, this has nothing to do with the
CORE package, but is part of Perl's syntax.
For many Perl functions, the CORE package contains real subroutines. This
feature is new in Perl 5.16. You can take references to these and make
aliases. However, some can only be called as barewords; i.e., you cannot
use ampersand syntax (&foo
) or call them through references. See the
shove
example above. These subroutines exist for all overridable
keywords, except for dump
and the infix operators. Calling with
ampersand syntax and through references does not work for the following
functions, as they have special syntax that cannot always be translated
into a simple list (e.g., eof
vs eof()
):
chdir
, chomp
, chop
, each
, eof
, exec
, keys
, lstat
,
pop
, push
, shift
, splice
, stat
, system
, truncate
,
unlink
, unshift
, values
To override a Perl built-in routine with your own version, you need to
import it at compile-time. This can be conveniently achieved with the
subs
pragma. This will affect only the package in which you've imported
the said subroutine:
To override a built-in globally (that is, in all namespaces), you need to
import your function into the CORE::GLOBAL
pseudo-namespace at compile
time:
- BEGIN {
- *CORE::GLOBAL::hex = sub {
- # ... your code here
- };
- }
The new routine will be called whenever a built-in function is called without a qualifying package:
In both cases, if you want access to the original, unaltered routine, use
the CORE::
prefix:
- print CORE::hex("0x50"),"\n"; # prints 80
This documentation provided by Tels <[email protected]> 2007.