NAME¶

Perl::Critic::Policy::Subroutines::ProhibitUnusedPrivateSubroutines - Prevent unused private subroutines.

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 such subroutines which are not used in the file which declares them. This module defines a 'use' of a subroutine as a subroutine or method call to it (other than from inside the subroutine itself), a reference to it (i.e. "my $foo = \&_foo"), a "goto" to it outside the subroutine itself (i.e. "goto &_foo"), or the use of the subroutine's name as an even-numbered argument to "use overload".

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::ProhibitUnusedPrivateSubroutines]
    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::ProhibitUnusedPrivateSubroutines]
    allow = _bar _baz

These are added to the default list of exemptions from this policy. So the above allows "sub _bar {}" and "sub _baz {}", even if they are not referred to in the module that defines them.

HISTORY¶

This policy is derived from Perl::Critic::Policy::Subroutines::ProtectPrivateSubs, which looks at the other side of the problem.

BUGS¶

Does not forbid "sub Foo::_foo{}" because it does not know (and can not assume) what is in the "Foo" package.

SEE ALSO¶

Perl::Critic::Policy::Subroutines::ProtectPrivateSubs.

AUTHOR¶

Chris Dolan <cdolan@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT¶

Copyright (c) 2009-2011 Thomas R. Wyant, III. 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.