Re: capture output from another program

[xdg]

You want Capture::Tiny. It can do both perl and external programs.

[BioLion]

Thanks - I have also had some success with IPC::Run

[xdg]

That works too, though I'm partial to IPC::Run3. I wrote Capture::Tiny so I could use just one thing consistently instead of one thing to capture Perl and another to capture from external programs, and another to capture from XS and so on. For example, IO::Capture uses ties, so it only captures from pure perl. Output from XS or from system won't be captured.

Capture::Tiny uses one syntax to capture whatever you want:

use Capture::Tiny 'capture';

my ($out, $err) = capture {
  print "Capture this";
  might_print_via_XS();
  system($^X, '-e', 'print "Capture me too\n"; warn "And this"');
};

That just seemed far more convenient to me.

If anyone is interested, I gave a talk on "How Not to Capture Output in Perl", which shows some of the difficulties/limitations using other things to capture output.

And while the talk doesn't mention it, Capture::Tiny even handles utf8 output:

use Capture::Tiny 'capture';

binmode(*STDOUT, ':utf8');

my $out = capture {
  print "Hi! \x{263a}\n";
  system($^X, '-e', 'print "Hi! \x{263a}\n"');
};