Agent::Message(3pm)					User Contributed Perl Documentation				       Agent::Message(3pm)

NAME

       Log::Agent::Message - a log message

SYNOPSIS

	require Log::Agent::Message;

	my $msg = Log::Agent::Message->make("string");
	$msg->prepend("string");
	$msg->append("string");
	my $copy = $msg->clone;

	print "Message is $msg
";     # overloaded stringification

DESCRIPTION

       The Log::Agent::Message class represents an original log message (a string) to which one may prepend or append other strings, but with the
       special property that prepended strings aggregate themselves in FIFO order, whilst appended strings aggregate themselves in LIFO order,
       which is counter-intuitive at first sight.

       In plain words, this means that the last routine that prepends something to the message will get its prepended string right next to the
       original string, regardless of what could have been prepended already. The behaviour is symetric for appending.

INTERFACE

       The following routines are available:

       append($str)
	   Append suppled string $str to the original string (given at creation time), at the head of all existing appended strings.

       append_last($str)
	   Append suppled string $str to the original string (given at creation time), at the tail of all existing appended strings.

       clone
	   Clone the message. This is not a shallow clone, because the list of prepended and appended strings is recreated. However it is not a
	   deep clone, because the items held in those lists are merely copied (this would matter only when other objects with overloaded
	   stringification routines were supplied to prepend() and append(), which is not the case today in the basic Log::Agent framework).

       make($string)
	   This is the creation routine.

       prepend($str)
	   Prepend supplied string $str to the original string (given at creation time), at the tail of all existing prepended strings.

       prepend_first($str)
	   Prepend supplied string $str to the original string (given at creation time), at the head of all existing prepended strings.

       stringify
	   This is the overloaded "" operator, which returns the complete string composed of all the prepended strings, the original string, and
	   all the appended strings.

AUTHOR

       Raphael Manfredi <Raphael_Manfredi@pobox.com>

SEE ALSO

       Log::Agent(3).

perl v5.10.0							    2002-03-09						       Agent::Message(3pm)