How do I list available methods on a given object or package in Perl?

Question

How do I list available methods on a given object or package in Perl?

Answer 1

If you have a package called Foo, this should do it:

no strict 'refs';
for(keys %Foo::) { # All the symbols in Foo's symbol table
  print "$_\n" if defined &{$_}; # check if symbol is method
}
use strict 'refs';

Alternatively, to get a list of all methods:

no strict 'refs';
my @methods = grep { defined &{$_} } keys %Foo::;
use strict 'refs';

Answer 2

There are (rather too) many ways to do this in Perl because there are so many ways to do things in Perl. As someone commented, autoloaded methods will always be a bit tricky. However, rather than rolling your own approach I would suggest that you take a look at Class::Inspector on CPAN. That will let you do something like:

my @methods =   Class::Inspector->methods( 'Foo::Class', 'full', 'public' );

Answer 3

if you have a package that is using Moose its reasonably simple:

print PackageNameHere->meta->dump;

And for more complete data:

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper( PackageNameHere->meta );

Will get you started. For everything else, theres the methods that appear on ->meta that are documented in Class::MOP::Class

You can do a bit of AdHoc faking of moose goodness for packages without it with:

use Class::MOP::Class;
my $meta = Class::MOP::Class->initialize( PackageNameHere );

and then proceed to use the Class::MOP methods like you would with Moose.

For starters:

 $meta->get_method_map();

use Moose; #, its awesome.

Answer 4

In general, you can't do this with a dynamic language like Perl. The package might define some methods that you can find, but it can also make up methods on the fly that don't have definitions until you use them. Additionally, even calling a method (that works) might not define it. That's the sort of things that make dynamic languages nice. :)

What task are you trying to solve?