As an alternative to the object-oriented interface, text containing MicroMason markup code can be
compiled and executed by calling the following functions.
Please note that this interface is maintained primarily for backward compatibility with version 1 of
Text::MicroMason, and it does not provide access to some of the newer features.
Each function creates a new MicroMason object, including any necessary traits such as Safe compilation or
CatchErrors for exceptions, and then passes its arguments to an appropriate method on that object.
You may import any of these functions by including their names in your "use Text::MicroMason" statement.
BasicInvocation
To evaluate a Mason-like template, pass it to execute():
$result = execute( $mason_text );
Alternately, you can call compile() to generate a subroutine for your template, and then run the
subroutine:
$result = compile( $mason_text )->();
If you will be interpreting the same template repeatedly, you can save the compiled version for faster
execution:
$sub_ref = compile( $mason_text );
$result = $sub_ref->();
(Note that the $sub_ref->() syntax is unavailable in older versions of Perl; use the equivalent
&$sub_ref() syntax instead.)
ArgumentPassing
You can also pass a list of key-value pairs as arguments to execute, or to the compiled subroutine:
$result = execute( $mason_text, %args );
$result = $sub_ref->( %args );
Within the scope of your template, any arguments that were provided will be accessible in the global @_,
the %ARGS hash, and any variables named in an %args block.
For example, the below calls will all return '<b>Foo</b>':
execute('<b><% shift(@_) %></b>', 'Foo');
execute('<b><% $ARGS{label} %></b>', label=>'Foo');
execute('<%args>$label</%args><b><% $label %></b>', label=>'Foo');
TemplateFiles
A parallel set of functions exist to handle templates which are stored in a file:
$template = compile_file( './report_tmpl.msn' );
$result = $template->( %args );
$result = execute_file( './report_tmpl.msn', %args );
Template documents are just plain text files that contains the string to be parsed. The files may have
any name you wish, and the .msn extension shown above is not required.
ErrorChecking
Both compilation and run-time errors in your template are handled as fatal exceptions. The provided
try_execute() and try_compile() functions use a mixin class which wraps an eval { } block around the
basic execute() or compile() methods. In a scalar context they return the result of the call, or undef if
it failed; in a list context they return the results of the call (undef if it failed) followed by the
error message (undef if it succeeded). For example:
($result, $error) = try_execute( $mason_text );
if ( ! $error ) {
print $result;
} else {
print "Unable to execute template: $error";
}
A matching pair of try_*_file() wrappers are available to catch run-time errors in reading a file or
parsing its contents:
($template, $error) = try_compile_file( './report_tmpl.msn' );
($result, $error) = try_execute_file( './report_tmpl.msn', %args );
For more information, see Text::MicroMason::CatchErrors.
SafeCompartments
If you wish to restrict the operations that a template can perform, use the safe_compile() and
safe_execute() functions, or their try_*() wrappers.
For more information, see Text::MicroMason::Safe.