Question

I’ve got an XML::SAX::Base-based parser that looks something like this:

package MyParser;
use base qw(XML::SAX::Base);
our @ISA = ('XML::SAX::Base');

sub new {
    my $class = shift;
    my %params = @_;

    my $self = {
        thing   => $params{thing},
    };
    bless $self, $class;

    return $self;
}

sub start_element {
    my ($self, $data) = @_;
    # Do something useful using $data & $self->{thing}
}
1;

And I’m using it with XML::SAX::ParserFactory:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use MyParser;

my $parser = XML::SAX::ParserFactory->parser(
                Handler => MyParser->new
            );
$parser->parse_string('<document/>');

Is there a way that I can pass arguments to MyParser’s new() subroutine?

Answer 1

Your new method is already set up to receive arguments using %params, so just pass your arguments as a hash:

my $parser = XML::SAX::ParserFactory->parser(
            Handler => MyParser->new(param1=>$value1, param2=>$value2, ...)
        );

Then in your new method you can access the arguments as you would any other hash:

$param1 = $params{param1};
$param2 = $params{param2};
...