NAME

Data::Vitals - The Perl "Vital Statistics" Library

DESCRIPTION

The world of clothing and fashion works to an annoyingly anacronistic and complicated set of measurements. The Perl "Vital Statistics" Library is an attempt to create a comprehensive set of classes, object and algorithms for working with human-describing data such as height, body measurements, shoe, bra and other clothing sizes.

It is not intended to be the end to a means, or the solution to a specific problem, but rather a general package that can be used to build more specific packages. It is intended that the library should be extremely flexible, highly extendible, support locales in some form, and be heavily unit tested to ensure that packages built on top of Data::Vitals have a reliable base.

Data::Vitals measurement objects are useful for both male and female measurements.

Implementation Style

As is generally the case with complex and twisty subjects (such as DateTime) this library is implemented in a highly object-orientated form.

For the sake of completeness we take this to rather extreme levels. For example, a Data::Vitals::Waist object specifically refers for a measurement of the circumference of the torso taken at a waist.

Metric and Imperial

Please note that all measurements are stored and stringified into metric values (although they can be input in various forms). This is for forward compability with the long term worldwide trend towards metrification. For now, locales that use imperial values should explicitly call the various ->as_imperial methods.

Class List

Data::Vitals::Height - Height measurement

Data::Vitals::Circumference - General circumference measurement

Data::Vitals::Hips - Measurement of the circumference around the hips

Data::Vitals::Waist - Measurement of the circumference around the waist

Data::Vitals::Frame - The "Frame" measurement. Circumference around the chest, just below the breasts.

Data::Vitals::Chest - Measurement of the circumference around the chest

Data::Vitals::Underarm - Measurement of the circumference around the torso at a position under the arms.

STATUS

This contains an implementation of Height measurements, plus a number of measurements of the circumference of the torso at various points. i.e. Hips/Waist/Chest/etc

Unit testing and documentation is up to date.

Please note that nothing that produces an error (by returning undef) sets an error message in any form. This will be resolved in a later version.

Please note that the measurement ranges are very large by default. The maximum allowable values exceed by a small percentage the world records for the various measurements (at the time of writing).

However, the minimums of the range may be unsuitable for newborn or premature babies. The ability to customise these ranges will be added in a later version.

METHODS

height $height

The height method creates and returns a height object. It takes as argument a "height string".

Returns a new Data::Vitals::Height object on success, or undef on error.