I'm in the process of connecting the ouput of one external module to the input of another external module. The problem ist that the caller gives me a scalar ref, while I can call the imported method only with a file handle for output.

My solution is to pass the incoming scalar reference to one of IO::File or IO::Scalar, and then passing the resulting file handle along to the next function.

Now my question is: which IO::* module should I pick, considering that I want to ditribute my code to the general Perl users audience?

The docs of IO::Scalar mention IO::String as being its potential successor, but there is only one release of this module on CPAN, which also predates IO::Scalar's latest release...

Example code (snippet):

...
# do they provide a scalar ref as output buffer?
if ($output_ref) {
  $fh_out = new IO::Scalar($output_ref);
}
...
if (defined $fh_out) {
  # write XML to the scalar-tied file handle
  $self->{x_out} = new XML::Writer(OUTPUT => $fh_out);
} else {
  # default: print to STDOUT
  $self->{x_out} = new XML::Writer();
}
...
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Joe.