Re: OO style question: how much information to hide?

[ViceRaid]

Thanks, I've enjoyed this thread, and also my first taste of HTML::TokeParser::Simple's interface.

As a more general OO problem or pattern, I'd perhaps be interested in looking at the class which supplies the iterator method (H::TP::S), rather than the class of the objects over which it iterates (H::TP::S::Token). When I'm using a method that'll return some or all members of a larger collection, I'd like that method to guarantee what sort of objects will be returned. That way, I can safely call methods on the individual objects returned by the iterator which not all objects in the whole collection would have:

package HTML::TokeParser::Simple;

sub get_start_token {
    my $self  = shift;
    my $token;
    
    do {
        $token = $self->get_token;
    } until ( ! $token || $token->is_start_tag );
    
    return $token;
}

That said, this isn't that practically useful for a stream of objects, as in HTML::TP, where you want to act once and immediately and finally on every iterated object, rather than modifying a collection, then using a different iterator to do something else. The existing interface works like a treat.

ViceRaid