NAME

Pod::Eventual - read a POD document as a series of trivial events

VERSION

version 0.091440

SYNOPSIS

    package Your::Pod::Parser;
    use base 'Pod::Eventual';

    sub handle_event {
      my ($self, $event) = @_;

      print Dumper($event);
    }

DESCRIPTION

POD is a pretty simple format to write, but it can be a big pain to deal with reading it and doing anything useful with it. Most existing POD parsers care about semantics, like whether a =item occurred after an =over but before a back, figuring out how to link a L<>, and other things like that.

Pod::Eventual is much less ambitious and much more stupid. Fortunately, stupid is often better. (That's what I keep telling myself, anyway.)

Pod::Eventual reads line-based input and produces events describing each POD paragraph or directive it finds. Once complete events are immediately passed to the handle_event method. This method should be implemented by Pod::Eventual subclasses. If it isn't, Pod::Eventual's own handle_event will be called, and will raise an exception.

EVENTS

There are three kinds of events that Pod::Eventual will produce. All are represented as hash references.

Command Events

These events represent commands -- those things that start with an equals sign in the first column. Here are some examples of POD and the event that would be produced.

A simple header:

    =head1 NAME

    { type => 'command', command => 'head1', content => "NAME\n", start_line => 4 }

Notice that the content includes the trailing newline. That's to maintain similarity with this possibly-surprising case:

    =for HTML
    We're actually still in the command event, here.

    {
      type    => 'command',
      command => 'for',
      content => "HTML\nWe're actually still in the command event, here.\n",
      start_line => 8,
    }

Pod::Eventual does not care what the command is. It doesn't keep track of what it's seen or whether you've used a command that isn't defined. The only special case is =cut, which is never more than one line.

    =cut
    We are no longer parsing POD when this line is read.

    {
      type    => 'command',
      command => 'cut',
      content => "\n",
      start_line => 15,
    }

Waiving this special case may be an option in the future.

Text Events

A text event is just a paragraph of text, beginning after one or more empty lines and running until the next empty line (or =cut). The only special rule is that a text event's first line must not be indented, or it will become a verbatim event.

Text events look like this:

    {
      type    => 'text',
      content => "a string of text ending with a\n",
      start_line =>  16
    }

Verbatim Events

Verbatim events are identical to text events, but are created when the first line of text begins with whitespace. The only semantic difference is that verbatim events should not be subject to interpretation as POD text (for things like L<> and so on). They are often also rendered in monospace.

Pod::Eventual doesn't care.

METHODS

read_handle

    Pod::Eventual->read_handle($io_handle, \%arg);

This method iterates through the lines of a handle, producing events and calling the handle_event method.

The only valid argument in %arg (for now) is in_pod, which indicates whether we should assume that we are parsing pod when we start parsing the file. By default, this is false.

This is useful to behave differently when reading a .pm or .pod file.

read_file

This behaves just like read_handle, but expects a filename rather than a handle.

read_string

This behaves just like read_handle, but expects a string containing POD rather than a handle.

handle_event

This method is called each time Pod::Evental finishes scanning for a new POD event. It must be implemented by a subclass or it will raise an exception.

handle_nonpod

This method is called each time a non-POD line is seen -- that is, lines after =cut and before another command.

If unimplemented by a subclass, it does nothing by default.

handle_blank

This method is called at the end of a sequence of one or more blank lines.

If unimplemented by a subclass, it does nothing by default.

AUTHOR

  Ricardo SIGNES <rjbs@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2009 by Ricardo SIGNES.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as perl itself.

cpanm Pod::Eventual

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Pod::Eventual