Re^3: these aren't locals, but they seem to act like it

[mreece]

consider:

my %args = ( flags => 0x8001, img => "/path/file.jpg", ... );
if (ref $_[0] eq 'HASH') {
    @args{keys %{ $_[0] }} = values %{ $_[0] };
} else {
  for (qw( flags img name big gallery page caption num )) {
    $args{$_} = shift if @_;
  }
}