[Petal] Help with Custom Modifiers

[William McKee]

Last month there was some discussion about creating custom modifiers in an 
inline method (as suggested by Bruno in msg from JMH titled "[Petal] Re: 
improvement on the _code_with_line_numbers() method and how to writte my 
own modifiers?" sent on Fri, 6 Sep 2002 15:11:35).

Ok, I'm ready to try this idea in order to create a modifier that will 
uppercase the first letter of a variable. I tried the following code:

$Petal::Hash::MODIFIERS->{'uc_first:'} = sub {
	my $class = shift;
	my $hash  = shift;
	my $string = $hash->FETCH (@_);

	return unless($string);
	return "\u$string";
};

and received the following errors (these two seem to flip-flop back and 
forth each time I reload the page; btw, listing_type is the variable I'm 
passing to the modifier):

"cannot import Petal::Hash::Types::UC_First for modifier uc_first: at 
/usr/local/share/perl/5.6.1/Petal/Hash.pm line 263"

"Can't locate object method "FETCH" via package "listing_type" (perhaps 
you forgot to load "listing_type"?)"

Has this technique has not yet been enabled or am I missing something in 
my implementation? BTW, I tried to create a separate file and discovered 
that Petal wants to find my custom modifier library within the 
Petal::Hash::Types namespace and thus returning the same messages as 
above. My modifier package contains the following code:

package Knowmad::Petal::UC_First;
use strict;
use warnings;
sub process {
	my $class = shift;
	my $hash  = shift;
	my $string = $hash->FETCH(@_);

	return unless($string);
	return "\u$string";
}
1;

When I set the BASE_DIR, DISK_CACHE, etc, I call the following:
	$Petal::Hash::MODIFIERS->{'uc_first:'} = 'Knowmad::Petal::UC_First';

Help! What am I missing here?

While we're on the subject of modifiers, what do ya'll think about adding 
a synonym for false? I mistakenly tried to use not: today (I told you I 
was rusty!). That doesn't seem too unreasonable of a synonym...

Thanks,
William

-- 
 Lead Developer
 Knowmad Services Inc. || Internet Applications & Database Integration
 http://www.knowmad.com