How can I monkey-patch an instance method in Perl?

Question

I\'m trying to monkey-patch (duck-punch :-) a LWP::UserAgent instance, like so:

sub _user_agent_get_basic_credentials_patch {
  return ($usernam         


        

Answer 1

In the spirit of Perl's "making hard things possible", here's an example of how to do single-instance monkey patching without mucking with the inheritance.

I DO NOT recommend you actually doing this in any code that anyone else will have to support, debug or depend on (like you said, consenting adults):

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
{

    package Monkey;

    sub new { return bless {}, shift }
    sub bar { return 'you called ' . __PACKAGE__ . '::bar' }
}

use Scalar::Util qw(refaddr);

my $f = Monkey->new;
my $g = Monkey->new;
my $h = Monkey->new;

print $f->bar, "\n";    # prints "you called Monkey::bar"

monkey_patch( $f, 'bar', sub { "you, sir, are an ape" } );
monkey_patch( $g, 'bar', sub { "you, also, are an ape" } );

print $f->bar, "\n";    # prints "you, sir, are an ape"
print $g->bar, "\n";    # prints "you, also, are an ape"
print $h->bar, "\n";    # prints "you called Monkey::bar"

my %originals;
my %monkeys;

sub monkey_patch {
    my ( $obj, $method, $new ) = @_;
    my $package = ref($obj);
    $originals{$method} ||= $obj->can($method) or die "no method $method in $package";
    no strict 'refs';
    no warnings 'redefine';
    $monkeys{ refaddr($obj) }->{$method} = $new;
    *{ $package . '::' . $method } = sub {
        if ( my $monkey_patch = $monkeys{ refaddr( $_[0] ) }->{$method} ) {
            return $monkey_patch->(@_);
        } else {
            return $originals{$method}->(@_);
        }
    };
}