NAME

Perl::Critic::Policy::Documentation::RequireLinkedURLs - use L<> markup on URLs in POD

DESCRIPTION

This policy is part of the Perl::Critic::Pulp add-on. It asks you to put L<> markup on URLs in POD text in Perl 5.8 and higher.

    use 5.008;

    =head1 HOME PAGE

    http://foo.org/mystuff/index.html      # bad

    L<http://foo.org/mystuff/index.html>   # good

L<> markup gives clickable links in pod2html and similar formatters, and even in the plain text formatters may give <http://...> style angles around the URL which is a semi-conventional way to delimit from surrounding text and in particular from an immediately following comma or period.

This is only cosmetic and on that basis this policy is low priority and under the "cosmetic" theme (see "POLICY THEMES" in Perl::Critic).

Only plain text parts of the POD are considered. Verbatim paragraphs cannot have L<> markup (and it's usually a mistake to put it there, as per ProhibitVerbatimMarkup).

    This is verbatim text,

        http://somewhere.com      # ok in verbatim

Perl 5.8

L<http://...> linking of URLs is new in the Perl 5.8 POD specification. It comes out badly from the formatters in earlier Perl where the "/" is taken to be a section delimiter. For that reason this policy only applies if there's an explicit use 5.008 or higher in the code.

    use 5.005;

    =item C<http://foo.org>       # ok when don't have Perl 5.8 L<>

Bad URLs

Some obvious dummy URLs like L<http://foo.org> are ignored. They're only examples and won't go anywhere as a clickable link. You might like to put C<> for a typeface, but L<> is not required by this policy, and in fact is probably undesirable. Currently ignored URLs variations like

    http://foo.com
    https://foo.org
    ftp://bar.org.au
    http://quux.com.au
    http://xyzzy.co.uk
    http://foo.co.nz
    http://host:port
    http://...

A URL is anything starting http://, https://, ftp://, news:// or nntp://.

Begin Blocks

Text in any =begin :foo block is checked since : means POD markup and it's likely URLs can be helpfully linked there, even if it's only for some particular formatter.

Other =begin blocks are ignored since L<> there will not normally be possible or desirable.

Disabling

If you don't care about this, if for instance it's hard enough to get your programmers to write documentation at all without worrying about markup, then disable RequireLinkedURLs from your ~/.perlcriticrc file in the usual way (see "CONFIGURATION" in Perl::Critic),

    [-Documentation::RequireLinkedURLs]

SEE ALSO

Perl::Critic::Pulp, Perl::Critic, Perl::Critic::Policy::Documentation::RequirePodLinksIncludeText

HOME PAGE

http://user42.tuxfamily.org/perl-critic-pulp/index.html

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 Kevin Ryde

Perl-Critic-Pulp is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option) any later version.

Perl-Critic-Pulp is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Perl-Critic-Pulp. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

cpanm Perl::Critic::Pulp

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Perl::Critic::Pulp