perlhacktut - Walk through the creation of a simple C code patch
This document takes you through a simple patch example.
If you haven't read perlhack yet, go do that first! You might also want to read through perlsource too.
Once you're done here, check out perlhacktips next.
Let's take a simple patch from start to finish.
Here's something Larry suggested: if a U
is the first active format
during a pack, (for example, pack "U3C8", @stuff
) then the
resulting string should be treated as UTF-8 encoded.
If you are working with a git clone of the Perl repository, you will want to create a branch for your changes. This will make creating a proper patch much simpler. See the perlgit for details on how to do this.
How do we prepare to fix this up? First we locate the code in question
- the pack happens at runtime, so it's going to be in one of the
pp files. Sure enough, pp_pack
is in pp.c. Since we're going
to be altering this file, let's copy it to pp.c~.
[Well, it was in pp.c when this tutorial was written. It has now
been split off with pp_unpack
to its own file, pp_pack.c]
Now let's look over pp_pack
: we take a pattern into pat
, and then
loop over the pattern, taking each format character in turn into
datum_type
. Then for each possible format character, we swallow up
the other arguments in the pattern (a field width, an asterisk, and so
on) and convert the next chunk input into the specified format, adding
it onto the output SV cat
.
How do we know if the U
is the first format in the pat
? Well, if
we have a pointer to the start of pat
then, if we see a U
we can
test whether we're still at the start of the string. So, here's where
pat
is set up:
- STRLEN fromlen;
- register char *pat = SvPVx(*++MARK, fromlen);
- register char *patend = pat + fromlen;
- register I32 len;
- I32 datumtype;
- SV *fromstr;
We'll have another string pointer in there:
- STRLEN fromlen;
- register char *pat = SvPVx(*++MARK, fromlen);
- register char *patend = pat + fromlen;
- + char *patcopy;
- register I32 len;
- I32 datumtype;
- SV *fromstr;
And just before we start the loop, we'll set patcopy
to be the start
of pat
:
- items = SP - MARK;
- MARK++;
- sv_setpvn(cat, "", 0);
- + patcopy = pat;
- while (pat < patend) {
Now if we see a U
which was at the start of the string, we turn on
the UTF8
flag for the output SV, cat
:
- + if (datumtype == 'U' && pat==patcopy+1)
- + SvUTF8_on(cat);
- if (datumtype == '#') {
- while (pat < patend && *pat != '\n')
- pat++;
Remember that it has to be patcopy+1
because the first character of
the string is the U
which has been swallowed into datumtype!
Oops, we forgot one thing: what if there are spaces at the start of the
pattern? pack(" U*", @stuff)
will have U
as the first active
character, even though it's not the first thing in the pattern. In this
case, we have to advance patcopy
along with pat
when we see
spaces:
- if (isSPACE(datumtype))
- continue;
needs to become
- if (isSPACE(datumtype)) {
- patcopy++;
- continue;
- }
OK. That's the C part done. Now we must do two additional things before this patch is ready to go: we've changed the behaviour of Perl, and so we must document that change. We must also provide some more regression tests to make sure our patch works and doesn't create a bug somewhere else along the line.
The regression tests for each operator live in t/op/, and so we make
a copy of t/op/pack.t to t/op/pack.t~. Now we can add our tests
to the end. First, we'll test that the U
does indeed create Unicode
strings.
t/op/pack.t has a sensible ok() function, but if it didn't we could use the one from t/test.pl.
- require './test.pl';
- plan( tests => 159 );
so instead of this:
we can write the more sensible (see Test::More for a full explanation of is() and other testing functions).
Now we'll test that we got that space-at-the-beginning business right:
And finally we'll test that we don't make Unicode strings if U
is
not the first active format:
Mustn't forget to change the number of tests which appears at the top, or else the automated tester will get confused. This will either look like this:
- print "1..156\n";
or this:
- plan( tests => 156 );
We now compile up Perl, and run it through the test suite. Our new tests pass, hooray!
Finally, the documentation. The job is never done until the paperwork
is over, so let's describe the change we've just made. The relevant
place is pod/perlfunc.pod; again, we make a copy, and then we'll
insert this text in the description of pack:
- =item *
- If the pattern begins with a C<U>, the resulting string will be treated
- as UTF-8-encoded Unicode. You can force UTF-8 encoding on in a string
- with an initial C<U0>, and the bytes that follow will be interpreted as
- Unicode characters. If you don't want this to happen, you can begin
- your pattern with C<C0> (or anything else) to force Perl not to UTF-8
- encode your string, and then follow this with a C<U*> somewhere in your
- pattern.
See perlhack for details on how to submit this patch.
This document was originally written by Nathan Torkington, and is maintained by the perl5-porters mailing list.